Its hard to believe we have done a year since the last away day. Anyway, we had another great day again this year. All the exercises were different to the year before. We had a slight problem with the grouping. The Cranfield group was group 3 but Dileep was put in a different group where they had 7 members. We had 5 and all other groups had 6. Seemed like an easy problem to solve, but it wasn’t.
Our first exercise was a 4×4 off-road trip. Great registration. We each took a turn driving around the course with everyone else in the back. It was fine driving in the front but a little bouncy in the back without seat-belts.
The bow and arrow game was great fun but exhausting. You get 2 points if you hit someone on the opposite team and they are out. If they catch the arrow, they get 2 points and you are out. If you knock one of the targets out in the middle you get 5 points. You only start with one arrow each then you have to recover arrows from wherever you can which means going in the open. Obviously getting the targets gives you the most points but its more fun hitting each other. As I got hit the most – I probably had the most fun. I’m a bigger target than the others so the opposition cut their losses. But at least I got a short break. The arrows weren’t sharp but had a big rubber golf ball thing on the end. It still hurt when it hit you up the bum. Reminded me of some hospital treatment I once had.
The bucket game was good fun. We all had to wander around an enclosure and find buckets and take them one at a time to stack up in a pyramid. You were blindfold and one of your team (Katherine) guided you with her voice with the correct colour bucket to the correct place to make the pyramid. We seemed to win most of the tasks except the one where we had to make a shape on the ground with sticks. Sounds crap – it was, that’s why there are no pictures.
In the last function, we had to assemble a go-cart from the parts. Once assembled, we raced them between teams. They had to be pushed and there was no steering or brakes. They had a couple of ropes at the back so you could manually brake when you got to the end before turning around and racing back. I was turnarounder at the end so I didn’t have to run. I did run the first time but couldn’t keep up. Turnarounder was a very important job because you had to get the cart dead straight or you would run out of your line. This is what the team with Dileep as driver did and ran across our lane. Course they had 2 more pushers than us and we ended up crashing into them. Poor Dileep ended up with a broken finger, but he didn’t cry.
Hes not too hot at selfies. Not with that hand anyway.
Once our day was over, we came to the main event. The evening at the pub. They drove us from Oxford to Cambridge where we had a BBQ at a very nice pub with pretty settings. Shame it rained most of the evening but we were undercover with free drinks so we didn’t mind. Another excellent day thanks to the EPSRC. I hope I can get next year because I wont be seeing the Cambridge team or the Cranfield team so much as I have just accepted a PhD at Nottingham University. More about this later but I’m all set to start another new life back in the area where I was brought up. It should leave me with plenty of opportunities to catch up with old friends and look after my Mum. I’m in Japan on holiday at the moment and start at Nottingham upon my return so I imagine the next blog should be about Japan. See you later, just off for Saki and Sushi.
Diary of an Ageing Research Student 