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.

Pyjama time!

'Go to a random lecture'

'Go to a 9AM lecture in your pyjamas'

With these we decided to kill two birds with one stone. We had aimed to get to my 9AM Shorthand lecture a few minutes early so as not to look so weird, traipsing in wearing pyjamas. Alas, the traffic was murder and a drive that would normally take ten minutes took 45.
You know that feeling you get when you walk in a room and you think everyone is staring at you? Well this time it was real, 20 pairs of eyes following you as you find seats. Admittedly my class isn’t that big and it might have had more effect had we been in a proper lecture hall with 100 or so people, but evidently journalism just isn't as popular as say, American Studies.
The class seemed to go pretty well with Nicola actually becoming interested I thought would bore her to death. The others just doodled on their worksheets confusing shorthand with Egyptian Heiroglyphics.

Les Miserables review

Jean Valjean is a convict on parole who changes his name in an attempt to become an honest man, all the while evading capture by Inspector, Javert. Meanwhile Fantine, a working girl loses her job for having an illegitimate child, Cosette. The child is looked after by a family of innkeepers who treat her poorly. Fantine resorts to prostitution in order to pay for her daughter’s keep at the inn but later dies without ever seeing her daughter again. Valjean vows to look after Cosette and chooses to leave a simple life to protect her and keep away from Javert who has found out who Valjean really is. Cosette falls in love with Marius, a young man who is part of those fighting the state in the June Revolution.

I almost don’t want to call this a film; it is more a filming of an incredibly elaborate stage show. Performed almost entirely in song, this was an extremely powerful piece. It evoked such deep emotions of hope, fear and loss it drove many in the audience to tears on quite a few occasions, including myself.

For those who don’t know of his past as a stage actor, Hugh Jackman will surprise many with his talents which are pretty fantastic, especially in ‘Who Am I?’ His talents are seemingly unending.

In fact, the entire cast have incredible voices (with the possible exception of Amanda Seyfried, who was patchy in places like in Mamma Mia, but each to their own) especially Anne Hathaway’s ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ which was truly magical. The scene where Fantine sells her hair is particularly emotive as those are real tears as her hair was hacked off with a blade during filming.

I won't give details of the deaths but I would advise you to take a tissue or two. Everything you expect not to happen in this film happens, and will make you gasp at what just happened in front of your eyes.

Character-wise, the audience connects with every single one on such a level its heart-breaking when something happens, good or bad. Young Cosette is so innocent and fragile with a beautiful voice. Even Javert who is always on Valjean’s tail, you connect to him in a way that one never does with the villains of a film.

The entire film is pure musical incredible-ness and leaves you speechless when the credits roll. Or that may be just from crying so much.

Having not seen the stage performance, I don’t know how it compares but as its own film it’s just amazing and even if you’re not a fan of song I would recommend it

It has begun!

"Go to a university sports game and be avid, raving fans"

Rosie, one of my housemates, plays for the CCCU women’s basketball team. So one Sunday off we all went, a banner with “R O S I E” on it and we sat and screamed every time she had possession of the ball. You should have seen us when she scored. Only downside was we were the only spectators apart from the rest of the team. Rosie has banned us from appearing at a game ever again but the others liked it – I think it improved their morale when they lost sorely to the ‘Folkestone Flames’.

I'm not sure which one we plan on doing next but in the meantime, here's the snowman we made: