Best of Freshers’ Fair

We fought off the waves of leafleters today at freshers’ fair, seeking out the societies on the margins of university life.

We first bumped into Tom Rutland, president of OUSU, who was friendly and seemed pleased with how the fair was going this week.

We then came across the Conservative Association, but the student running the stall wasn’t too keen on being in the photo, so attempted to edge to the side as you can see. I wonder why.

Opposite the shy Tories were these friendly chaps, asking passers-by “Would you like some communism?”. We liked them.

There was this very impressive homemade stall for the dodgeball society, though drawing a penis on your sign is questionable marketing.

Korfball, we learnt, is a mixture of netball and basketball for both sexes – you can’t run with the ball but you can shoot from anywhere.  The sport is big in Holland, Taiwan and Oxford.

Octopush is underwater hockey, essentially.  They developed their impressive sign using Microsoft Word and a printer.

Here’s a picture of some people actually playing octopush, along with some people standing around.

We didn’t talk to everyone for too long because then you have the awkward moment at the end where you explain to someone very nice who’s put in lots of effort to sell something to you, that it sounds very interesting but it’s not for you.

Having walked to the fair ourselves, we thought we’d get on with these guys and although we declined to part with our emails, we did take a leaflet.

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We then entered the ‘miscellaneous’ room.

The Harry Potter society had a term card, pictured below.

Sundays have never looked so good.

This guy wasn’t actually Dr.Who, but he manned the stall excellently.

The Tolkien society guys told us 500 people signed up for them this week, which they were well pleased with.

The Role Playing Society man wasn’t too happy to have his photo taken, but eventually he got into character and all was well.

This super-serious game of chess was going on in the room – maybe they should replace the exclamation mark with a full stop.  Chess.

We came across the guys from ‘#FOMO’ who seem to be running  the Camera and Bridge nights. They were positioned about ten yards away from bitter rivals Shuffle Nights (Wahoo, Park End), where the promoter formerly known as Hannah Yolosquared was positioned.

The tension was noticeable, but in the end the event passed without any major trouble.  I guess when you love to party as much as they do it’s hard to hate.

That was the end of the fair, and we popped over to the Union who were hosting their own fair, which mainly consisted of someone dressed up as a giant Purple Turtle, promoting for the Union’s so-called nightclub, walking up and down the entrance high-fiving people.

If that doesn’t make you want to go out tonight, nothing will.