Memories of Uni……

Chris Hoskins — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:39:01 +0000

I’m having a wee bit of a nostalgic moment. I’m sitting in Rainy Hall, the canteen/ common room in New College, where I studied from 2001-2005.
I spent many hours in this hall chatting to friends and classmates. I went to many a ceilidh here too.
Being here brings back all my memories from uni. Not being the most academically minded I found a course that was 75% reading quite challenging! It was still awesome though.
I remember at Christmas in 2nd year, I spent a whole day sitting in rainy hall just sitting chatting. It was just before we broke for Christmas and me and Mark Hughes (who was Best Man at our wedding) discovered they were selling mulled wine in the canteen. So we spent the day enjoying that while chatting to each other and anyone else who came in!
There was always an awesome community spirit about New College, not everyone wanted to be a part of that, but those of us who did always remember it fondly!
Rainy Hall reminds me of the great hall in Hogwartsm it doesn’t have the awesome ceiling, house elves or massiveness, but it has that kind of medieval feel to it. A beautifully intricately carved roof as well as mini ‘chadeliers’ and many coats of arms around the wall.
At uni I was treasurer of the New College students association. As well as being a part of the committee, I was part of the social group. Which involved planning ceilidhs and balls and decorating New College at Christmas. That was always awesome fun, we had a huge tree that went up in rainy hall, the stand was broken so every year we had to improvise a stand for it!
I know I’m probrably boring you at this point, but I’ll keep going anyway!
As well as being home to many uni memories, New College is the home of many other memories. New College serves as part of the home of the General assembly of the Church of Scotland every May. An event I have been a youth rep at 5 times since 2001. I love going to GA. It can be dull, it can be nitpicky, but there’s still a great atmosphere about the place.
If you ever get the chance to come to New College, even just to look round, take it!
That’ll do for now.
Peace our
Chris

Christmas!?

Chris Hoskins — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 01:07:33 +0000

Hope all of you had a good Christmas. I certainly had a very enjoyble day, from being woken at 8am by Linda’s excited parents, to an awesome dinner where I ate loads, to trying out my new Gorilla Tripod. We were notciably absent from any sort of Church activity :-/ I’m ny required to do much in Portlethen services, and Linda’s parents Church had no Christmas day service. So the only service we were at was the 8pm at Penicuik North Kirk, the Church Jonnie’s Dad is minister at. It was a really good service, lovely songs and readings, I found myself thinking back to my experiences in Israel alot. Wondering wat things were like for the people we met in the unreconized villages, in Bethlehem, what it would be like to be in a country where the majority of the population don’t celebrate or care about Christmas…mostly I wondered about the people we saw/met/heard of that would celebrate today for Jesus, and Jesus alone, because they don’t really have much else. I found myself thinking that, in many ways, they must have a much more authentic experience/vew of Christmas than those of us in the west, they don’t have as many consumeristic trappings vying for their attention at this time of year, there seems to be so much more space and time made for the worship aspect of Christmas. Maybe thats just something I need to work on and not the whole western world! Jonnie’s Dad kicked of all these thoughts with his talk, he was speaking about how so many of us fall into the trap of celebrating Christmas without really remembering Jesus…quite thought provoking.
It was a wierd Christmas, family wise. It didn’t really feel like Christmas to most of us, until today. I don’t think any of us realised how much we were going to miss Iona. It was sad to think about how this was meant to be her first Christmas…….

Endure Fort» Christmas

Memories of Uni……

Christmas!?