National YSA Conference 2011 Sunday Night/Monday morning "Happyness comes from many sources including golden arches"

So Sunday night previously had always been about heading across the road at the stroke of midnight to buy lots of fast food , however this year that wasn’t going to be happening as mainly there was no fast food places nearby at all. None, zero, zipo. Which did leave me wondering initially what we could do short of hanging around outside talking.

Going to one of the hall common rooms to watch tv was probably well off the list of possibilities even with news of what had happened between Man U And Arsenal causing many lads to long after watching match of the day because mainly a group of lads who had found a TV earlier in the day to watch sky news had become subject to a especially blunt and direct shall we say tongue lashing from a group of girls about not respecting the Sabbath.

Although I’m sure that the irony of them choosing to give this “advice” in the form of a public dressing down probably alluded them.

However my plans were quickly sorted when I was invited down to the girls hall again, which admittedly was an invitation from Phoenix and the girls in the form of “ You are coming” not “would you like to?”. Not that I minded of course. It felt nice to be wanted.

I joined up with braveheart and three other guys who had also been invited and we legged it back to the hall to change with very firm instructions to change and be back outside within 10 minutes or we were getting left behind. I was half way through changed when I was suddenly struck by the random thought that the room had no less than seven mirrors in it. My next thought was why the heck I was thinking about mirrors when there were people waiting. Out the door muppet, go move, quickly!

However for a change I was the first one to be ready and had to wait for the others, who eventually appeared after a lot of nervous pacing from braveheart who understandably wanted to get down to the girls hall asap. ( which I can understand).

But.... when we got down there we discovered out haste had been well a bit hasty as none of the girls had appeared. Our quick change however meant we were there in plenty of time to grab the tables so we could once again play yahtzee. ( seriously I actually started to feel like I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms from that darn game this weekend.) We also started playing card games as well, which at one point set me off on a complete fit of the giggles which I found a bit hard to explain, as lets face it my usual Sunday night does not involve sitting round a table with a large group of friends being taught card games.

It was still quite early in the night to think of food as we were still sticking to the adage from previous years that the Sabbath ended at midnight. Not so some of the other “younger” YSA who were saw passing through the hall who were starting to reappear with large amounts of pizza and so forth and then loud music started coming from the common room ( we were gathered around some tables in the foyer) before the lights went out. There was a long moment of unspoken pondering of whether we needed to do anything before the lights came back on, saving us from that particular dilemma.

Finally midnight came and so it was time for food. Or at least it would have been it we could have decided on what it was we wanted. It seemed like everyone was trying to be polite and deferring to the next person saying they would go with what they wanted which would have worked if everytime we had gone to the “next person” they hadn’t said exactly the same thing.

As it tuned out our long almost 20 minute discussion which finally settled on pizza proved to be in vain as the pizza place had shut, leaving us with only the local 24 hours mcdonald.

Which was still fun if slightly bizarre to end up eating McDonalds in the early hours of a Monday morning ( because of course pizza would have made much more sense. Oh wait no it wouldn’t have...)

But in all honesty I really didn’t care by that point as I was having way, way too much fun.......especially as we were onto playing Irish snap at this point.
However fun or not eventually the sensation of burning eyes began to creep in as my bodys polite way of saying “ I don’t care how much fun your having but your not 21 anymore and you need to call it a night”.

I took my leave, tired but very happy. Things had come back a massive 360% after the unexpectedness of what happened in the workshop that afternoon, as my spirits had got back to what they had been and had continued to rise. To be honest the workshop had probably only hit me so hard as I had been very tired and had let my armour slip, so another time it might have only proven to be very irritating as opposed to a full scale punch in the chest.

I checked my alarm for one last time that gleefully told me just how little time I had before I was going to have to drag myself out of bed for breakfast in the morning. Now I saw morning but lets be honest it was actually later the same day by this point.

Still I wouldn’t have traded those last few hours for anything in the world