Autumn chill

Today the News and Media team are feeling the cold. As Cris nipped out for his lunchtime run in a bid to warm up, the rest of the team rummaged through the dressing up box and coat stand for a few extra layers to see us through chillsome times. Laura, visiting from Leeds Business School, was on hand to witness the sorry sight. 

Linda G

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Plane Crazy

As a stay-at-home dad on Fridays, I sometime struggle to find interesting and worthwhile things to do with my nineteen-month-old son. He's at that awkward age where he has started walking and (almost) talking, but also still needs two naps a day and is prone to needing his nappy changing at inopportune moments.

One of his current obsessions (like most small boys of his age) is mechanical things such as diggers, cranes and lorries. We were driving through Yeadon a few weeks ago, when I wondered whether he would be interested in watching the planes taking off and landing at Leeds Bradford Airport. At the very least, the noise of jets passing overhead would keep him occupied for a while.

After a quick search on the internet, using the power of the iPhone, it became clear that there is a one major spot where people in Leeds with a lot of time on their hands go to watch planes. I headed for the cheerfully-named Cemetery Road in Yeadon, where a layby overlooking the runway offers great views of passing air traffic.



Strictly speaking, no-one is supposed to park there, because it's double yellow lines. As a fellow plane-spotter sagely observed to me, if a traffic warden wandered up there, they'd have a field day. But it seems to be pretty well-established as a local tourist attraction, complete with an attendant ice-cream van. It's a pity people don't look after it a bit better though - the ground is littered with broken glass and litter, and people clamber over the cemetery wall to get a better view of the jets passing overhead. It must be a bit galling if you've driven over to put flowers on your grandmother's grave, to then have to weave your way past plane-spotters eating Soleros and playing loud trance from their Honda Civics.

There is also a hard-core of plane-spotters who clearly spend a lot of time hanging around this spot armed with enormous telephoto lenses and and ham radio equipment. They spend a lot of time in their cars, fiddling with antennae and listening to Leeds Bradford air-traffic control. They also serve as a useful early-warning system for when a plane is about to take off or land, because they get excited and twitchy, dashing out of their cars and scanning the sky with binoculars.

Now, call me a nerd, but watching a 40-ton jet flying over your head at a few hundred feet is undeniably quite exciting. Landings are quite a surreal experience in this particular spot, because the plane's engines are running at lower power, therefore its approach is quite silent. It arrives out of nowhere, and suddenly the sky is filled with a huge aircraft, seemingly headed straight for you. It's a heady experience.

Takeoffs, when the wind is in the right direction, are equally exciting. Depending on which way the windsock is blowing, the planes taxi very close to the waiting spectators, before gunning their engines to full power. At that close range, you can really feel the force of jets, like standing next to the bass speakers at a concert. It seems at the moment inconceivable that the huge plane in front you will actually be able to leave the ground. Then the roar deepens, and slowly, the plane begins to rumble down the runway, gathering speed until it leaves the ground.

I'm not a fan of flying in planes - given the choice, I'd much rather stand on the ground watching them. Hanging around with my Max Power and CB Radio chums gave me a fresh perspective on this phobia. I think flying in planes is actually too exciting to be an entirely comfortable experience. It actually doesn't feel right that people are sat reading Heat magazine while thousands of pounds of thrust are preparing to blast you three miles high into the stratosphere.

I wouldn't go as far as Will Self, who suggested that the inflight movie plays the 'Beyond The Infinite' sequence from 2001 as you take off, but I think a bit of razzmatazz definitely wouldn't go amiss. Just so long as I didn't have to sit next to a fellow plane-spotter throughout the entire flight.

CN
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Nature ramblings

Our relocation to Headingley Campus last December presented the opportunity to enjoy a daily walk to work from Kirkstall through a variety of green spaces and up through Beckett Park to the Grange. Walking the same route everyday makes you much more aware of the effects of seasonal change.

Despite the wintry weather that greeted our move, Beth and I wasted little time in making the most of our new location and donned our wellies for our nature walks through the adjacent woodland.

It's satisfying how quickly you become accustomed to the sights and sounds and during our first nature walk a familiar tapping in the treetops was deftly located and identified as a Great Spotted Woodpecker. Result! They’re regularly seen in this part of the woodland but a sighting never fails to raise the spirits. 

Winter saw the landscape transformed with snow and ice. The beech saplings retained their paper thin autumn leaves throughout, and provided a picturesque backdrop for the feathered residents of the wood. 

With the coming of Spring, my favourite sights included the emerging downy Beech leaves and flowers, also the Willow catkins in the hedgerows near Headingley train station and in the gardens of South Lodge that attract bees and butterflies, the early springtime pollinators.

Spring gradually transforms the stark landscape of Queens Wood, with its bare branches and dead brambles into a world of verdant foliage.  Patches of native bluebells temporarily carpet the ground. 

Summer saw the butterflies arrive in force, Speckled Woods in the dappled clearings, whilst Meadow Browns, Peacocks, Ringlets, and Commas preferred areas such as the tall grassy patches to the right of the Grange which are specifically left uncut by the Estates Team to provide habitats for wildlife.

Towards the end of August, the combination of sun and rain brought out an abundance of weird and wonderful fungi on Beckett Park grassland and underneath the Beech canopies.

The marquee is currently being constructed on the Acre and later this week we welcome our new and returning students. This will be our first autumn at Headingley Campus, despite the prospect of having to dig out a fleece and gloves to wear on my daily walk, I’m looking forward to seeing the campus and surroundings take on an autumnal hue and to the forthcoming events associated with this particular season.  

Find out more about the Grounds & Woodland Management at our university, and includes details of the Biodiversity Action Plan 2006 - 2016.  The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust is a great source of information about places and activities in the region. 

Bye for now

Linda

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Flying high

One of the more bizarre moments in my Leeds Met career was at Graduation one year when Paul Brow had offered to take some aerial video footage of the festivities at Headingley Campus. After a few phone calls Paul was up in the air hovering above filming from his helicopter. Sir Ian Botham was receiving an honorary degree at the time and had attracted a lot of media attention and the helicopter was drowning out the interviews taking place. To cut a long story short after a lot of running around I managed to get a message through to Paul via the airfield he operates from and the helicopter finally buzzed off.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago when I was looking for people to feature in the staff magazine and I knew Paul was involved in filming from the air for a whole raft of television programmes including various news programmes, The Lakes and The Politics Show. It’s these kinds of stories behind our staff that make the making, and hopefully the reading of the magazine so interesting.

After the magazine was sent to print almost out of the blue Paul got back in touch with the offer to experience his obsession first hand with a short flight above Leeds. To be fair the thought of getting into a helicopter initially filled me with trepidation, I’ve not got the best head for heights but Paul assured me that while he also hates being at the top of ladders or on the edge of a cliff, flying is different.

So it was I found myself in a field in what seemed like the middle of nowhere with a shiny blue helicopter awaiting my arrival. Also there was one of Paul’s colleagues Alex, who was fulfilling his girlfriend’s dream of a helicopter ride. After a brief introduction to the machine and the requisite safety checks we were ready for the off. As the helicopter blades were thudding overhead and we started to tilt forward to take off I realised there was very little to hold on to and having been given the front seat I was almost completely surrounded by windows with no distraction from the ground below. I had a silent talk to myself to be brave and braced myself. 

Once we were up in the air, the ride became a lot smoother, the weather conditions were perfect with very little cloud and soon we were high in the sky. All my previous fears slipped away as I became mesmerised by the goings on below, crossing the A1 and heading towards Leeds. The view was amazing, I’ve always thought of Leeds as being very hilly but the ground looked relatively flat with the city almost encased in a bowl. For the next 30 minutes or so we took a tour, seeking clearance with Leeds Bradford Airport to fly over Headingley Carnegie Stadium where a cricket match was in full flow across to Headingley Campus where a wedding party was gathered on the Acre taking photos. It was weird also seeing my own house, which I had left full of nerves just a short hour or two earlier, from the air.

There were many familiar and not so familiar landmarks to see from a new perspective and but the highlight for me was the sensation of being in the opening credits of Emmerdale as we approached and flew over the soap’s village stage set in the grounds of Harewood House. As we headed back to base it was time for Paul to have some fun with us doing some sharp turns and manoeuvres bringing on the first hint of any kind of air sickness and making the disappointment that it was all over a little less disappointing.

I absolutely loved my time in the sky and know I was grinning like an idiot from the moment we took off until late into the day. Thanks Paul for the amazing experience – I think you may have another convert on your hands.

For anyone interested in their own helicopter experience flight then please contact Paul for more information.

Joyce


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Carrie on Researching!

Realising that I’m now the only person in the team not to have written a blog entry yet, my colleague Mark asked me yesterday if I’d like to write something about what I’ve been up to lately.  I felt a bit daunted by the idea and had thought about it a number of times and then chickened out and got on with something else.  Today I decided I should go for it and let everyone know about the ongoing feature I have been working on for the staff magazine, LS126. 

It is called ‘Carrie on researching’ (I did chuckle to myself for probably an embarrassing amount of time after coming up with this so it had to stay!) and involves me meeting up with Leeds Met researchers all over the university to chat with them about what it is they do.  I’ve met up with 7 people so far and every time I’ve got back to the office with a big grin on my face, really excited about the amazing work people are doing and just loving how many completely different things are going on in the place where I work.  This is really important to me in a job and I am quite spoilt working for a university where I can be surprised almost every day.

Well, that could be a completely different story but what I want to write about is the amazing people I’ve met so far through ‘Carrie on researching.’  For the edition that has just been printed, I met up with Alan Edmondson in the Microbiology Group and Colin Pattinson from the new Faculty of Arts, Environment and Technology.  Alan was so full of enthusiasm as he talked and he agreed to do an experiment for us to test 2 different types of mop used at Leeds Met to see which allowed the most amount of bacteria to grow on it after it had been used and cleaned.  The results were amazing! (You’ll have to have a look in the magazine to see for yourself – I know, that’s a bit naughty but it’ll be online by the time this goes up.)  After meeting with Alan I felt really excited about science, which actually happens to me quite a lot really. I always have a tiny regret at abandoning sciences after GCSE in favour of a perhaps unnecessary 3 language A Level choice.  Later I met up with Colin and was really surprised to find out how much work he and his team are doing to trial and test potentially massive energy-saving IT systems in this university that we may end up being able to use ourselves in the future, saving us money and doing a lot for the environment.

I’ve already met up with the researchers for the next edition but I will keep that secret for now.  I will just say that they are completely different subjects again, one closer to my own heart (literature) and one that absolutely amazed me and had to be explained to me quite a few times for my head to take in what it was hearing!

That’s all really… I’ve written more than 500 words which may explain to Mark why I felt reluctant to start writing a blog entry as I’m not one for being able to just write 200 words!

TTFN!

Carrie


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