Reading University Caving Club

Announcements

Welcome, Freshers!

First, may I give you a warm welcome to our website. It’s lovely to have you here, and I do hope you can stay for tea!

Everything’s hotting up all over campus as the University prepares for this year’s influx of Freshmen, and societies, clubs and volunteer groups all vie for the precious commodity that is a Fresher’s spare time. Our efforts this year will be many and varied, utilising some daring and cutting-edge advertising techniques:

After all, nothing works quite like good old-fashioned, barefaced bribery!

Please don’t hesitate to visit our Facebook Group or Join our Mailing list! And there’s plenty to explore on this site – why not check out a Photo Album to see what you might expect on a weekend trip, or, if you’re still a bit confused as to why the people in the picture above are wearing silly clothes, look at out Frequently Asked Questions page!

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Trips for next term!

Greetings!

Apologies for the delayed announcement: We’ve got a whole lot of goodies and treats planned for the coming term!

We’ll be kicking off Freshers’ Week with a massive poster/flyer campaign, for which any designs you can rustle up would be much appreciated. Freshers Fayre itself is on Thursday the 4th of October, and we shall be out in force publicising the club and trying to persuade as many new people as possible that it’s an awesome thing to spend your free time doing! After the Fayre has closed, we’ll be doing a presentation somewhere on campus to give a more detailed description of who we are and what we do, followed by a walk down to the Back of Beyond for a celebratory curry (I think there’ll be another presentation on Monday for those who can’t make it on Thursday). Our ridiculously ambitious schedule of trips is as follows:

Oct 7th – Freshers’ day trip to the Mendips

 

Oct 12-14th – First weekend trip to South Wales – staying at the South Wales Caivng Club (We’re sharing with Aberystwyth University, which should be a laugh!)

 

Oct 19-21st – Second weekend trip to South Wales – staying at Whitewalls

 

Nov 2-4th – Priddy fireworks trip – staying at the Cerberus

 

Nov 9-11th – CHECC Forum! – Held in the Mendips this year (at Yoxter Farm); we’ll be trying to win the ‘Most Awesome Caving Club’ trophy for Reading!

 

Nov 30th – Dec 2nd – Weekend trip to Yorkshire – staying at the BPC (To get an early start with SRT training!)

 

The day trip will be a brief introduction to the sport of caving, while the weekend trips offer a more complete caving-club experience, with breakfasts, dinner and fun included!
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Finally!

IMG_2436-P50

Welcome, to all you denizens of the Internet, and especially any soon-to-be students of the University of Reading!

After many moons of delay, faff and excuses, I am at long last uploading the enormous backlog of photos from all our trips this year. At the moment it looks like we haven’t done anything since October, but I assure you we’ve been very busy indeed, just a little lazy in the post-production stages!

Anyway, check back this afternoon to see what we’ve been up to all year.

Christopher

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AGM Results!

Hello everybody!

Two Mondays ago, we held our AGM at the venerable and accommodating Sweeny & Todd’s Pie Shop, meaning that we now have a new committee! The elections were hotly contested; a great day for caving democracy! The night thereafter, unfortunately, seems a little hazy.
Here are the new committee for the year 2012/13:
President – Chrissie Picken
Secretary – May Alexander
Treasurer – Kat Hooper
Tacklemaster – Yiorgos Gadanakis
Webmaster – Ben Wilson and Christopher Holt
Social Secretary – Georgina Redgate
Permit (& Survey) Officer – Alex Manthorpe
Training Officer – J Bouchard
Cake Secretary – Anna Rabbett and Mesh Yalvac

Permit Officer is a new one, to ease the Secretary’s job with a view to getting us to certain places called ‘caves’, and will also take responsibility for the club library. Training Officer is so we have an official-sounding title to describe what J does. We realised that we’d rather have two Cake Secretaries than one, and I’m looking forward to working with Ben as Co-Webmaster throughout the year ahead.

Things are  looking interesting for next term. I think J’s doing a small trip over the May Day Bank Holiday (get in touch with him for information), while most of us are revising hard at the Beer Festival. The next big trip will be over the Jubilee Weekend, to Yorkshire.
More news to come!

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Some Important Upcoming Dates

It was great to see so many of you at the freshers fayre yesterday!

Below is a round-up of some of the most important dates for events that are happening very soon this term…

  • This Saturday we’re going on a day trip to The Mendips, in Somerset. For those of you who have signed up, we are meeting at 8:30am for a 9am departure, meeting outside the Sports Park (gym) on campus – see building 39 on this map [pdf file]. We’ll depart from the adjacent Athletics Pavilion car park (Building 43). More Details »
  • On Monday (10th October), we are running through our presentation for new members again, in case you missed it yesterday. Meeting at 7pm in HUMSS Room 126 (Building 1). Or if you prefer, you can meet us at 8-8:30pm outside the Palmer Building (Building 26). We’ll then take you to our regular Monday evening meeting spot – the College Arms pub on Wokingham Road. You can find out more about us, get to meet some of the older members, and sign up for trips. It should be a really fun night out! More Details »
  • On the weekends of 14th-16th October and 21st-23rd October we’ll be heading to South Wales. You can sign up for these trips on Monday at the pub, or online… More Details »
  • We’re also planning a big ‘Pub Golf’ social – this will be taking place very soon! More details will be provided shortly…

If you have any questions or would like to know more, please contact our president Elsie or our secretary Chris. It’s going to be a fantastic term – I’m looking forwards to meeting everyone at these events!

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Welcome to Our New and Improved Website

RU Cavers logo

I am delighted to welcome you to our brand new website! Our old site has served us well over the last 8+ years, however we decided it was time to give it a bit of a lick of paint… So what’s new? In a nutshell:

  • Brand new look and feel, whilst remaining true to the spirit of the previous site.
  • More ways for club members to participate on and interact with the site. Add comments to any post, page, gallery or photo, and even add new posts to the front page! Find out more »
  • Calendar on the top right with links to details of all upcoming club events.
  • Better integration with Facebook. Easily share any post or page, and even log into this site with your Facebook username! We’ll be adding additional Facebook integration in the near future…
  • Easier to get in touch with committee members and enquire about joining the club, using our new Contact Form!
  • And last but not least, the new site is much easier to maintain, which means that it can (at last!) be updated much more frequently!

Of course I’d love your feedback on these changes – got any suggestions for improvements, ideas for the site, or have spotted any errors? Please let me know – either by adding a comment below this post, or by using the new contact form »

Older members will be aware that these changes have been in the works for quite some time. There are plenty of further plans though – over the next few weeks there should be lots more activity… In the meantime, many thanks to Paul Fellows, who set up our original site and devoted a huge amount of time to it; as well as to those of you who helped out with this new one – particularly Jo Meldner and Kat Hooper.

By the way, the old site hasn’t completely vanished off the face of the earth – you can still access it from http://old.rucavers.co.uk

So, here’s to the next 8 years!

Patrick Hathway
Webmaster

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Lots of New Photos

Cave Formations Gallery

Henley Pub Crawl - June 2011

South Wales Trip - May 2011

Star Wars House Party - March 2011

 

AGM - March 2011

Yorkshire Trips - Febuary-March 2011

Caveman Social - February 2011

Scotland Skiing Trip - Christmas 2010

 

Christmas Party 2010

CHECC 2010

Halloween House Party - October 2010

South Wales Trip - October 2010

 

I am happy to announce a lot of new photos have now been added to the site – these were taken during many of our club events over the past year… To access them all, either click on a thumbnail above to go to the relevant gallery, or visit our Photos section. Many thanks to all those who have taken them!

By the way, now that we have moved to a new system, it should hopefully be much quicker to add photos to the site in future, so from now on they should (finally!) be appearing far more frequently…! That’s the plan, anyway…

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Events This Term

Somehow or other it appears that we have managed to organise LOADS of events for the coming term, even before it’s started! I can’t help feeling something must be wrong here – has the club ever been this organised before?! We’ve got plenty of trips to look forwards to, as well as a number of socials in the works – pub crawls, parties, a trip to Go Ape! (TBC), etc, etc. Thanks to the committee for planning all this 🙂

Anyway, I have updated the calender on the top right of every page to display all the events that we’re planning at the moment. Feel free to navigate through this calendar, and click on the days that are highlighted in yellow to view full details of the events that are happening on those days. I’ve also updated the Trips page to include details of all upcoming trips.

Note: it’s worth bearing in mind that some of these events and dates are provisional, so remember to check this site for further details nearer the time… If you are interested in attending any event, please feel free to get in touch!

It looks like we’ve got a brilliant term ahead of us!

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New Committee for 2011/12!

On Monday 21st March 2011 we held our AGM at Sweeney & Todds pie shop, where our new committee for the 2011/12 academic year was elected.

Here are the details of who was elected to each position:

President: Elsie Brooks
Secretary: Chris Holt
Treasurer: Alice Dale
Social Secretary: Kathryn Hooper
Tackle Master: Florence Goodwin
Webmaster: Patrick Hathway

And last but not least, we have a new very important position:

Cake Secretary (!) : Chrissie Picken

This was one of the most eventful AGMs that the club has had in many years – indeed, I think I’m right in saying that virtually every position was seriously contested by at least two candidates!! I’m sure this is a very healthy sign for the club.

So congratulations to everyone who was elected – I think we’ve got an amazing year ahead of us!

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