Tab Week: Churchill Spring Ball Presidents

Jan Freyberg and Anna McEntire are second years from Churchill studying Natsci and English, and are joint Presidents of Churchill Spring Ball.

In our words, this is their week.

Monday. Draw up the final contract with The Artful Dodger, one of our main acts. He’s asked to bring a few friends to the ball and is probably staying over in college afterwards. We get a friend who studies Law to look it over, always useful having a friendly lawyer around. In fact, friends and college help us out with lots of different aspects of Ball work – the rugby team are always on hand to shift heavy stuff. More volunteers leaves us with more budget for the important stuff: food and drink.

Tuesday. Have to spend the morning doing ladder training – the less glamorous side of ball organising. This includes a three page document on ladders and gems of wisdom such as “If you shut your finger in the ladder, remove it.”

Wednesday. 2,000 boxes of Krave arrive. Slightly more than we expected. Kellogg’s is one of our sponsors and have misunderstood our order for cereal for 400 people and instead sent us £400-worth of the nation’s favourite crispy cereal shells. This creates a minor storage issue. They end up stacked in one of the committee member’s rooms, built into a Krave fort in the corner.

Thursday. Food tasting day. We sit in Churchill’s kitchens sampling the recipes our Food and Drink team have created, delicious. Anna has a Dos meeting halfway through and so has to nip off in between the chicken and the venison to go talk about Chaucer. It takes a bit of organisation to fit work around our busy schedules, Anna has had to do an essay a week early to clear time for the final preparations next week.  Luckily Jan’s supervisor helped organise the Psychology Ball, so she understands and is always on hand with advice.

Friday. Have a chat with the Christian Union about our theme – they aren’t happy that we are focusing on sin. Try to explain that it is more about decadence than sin; we didn’t mean to offend people. It’s probably just as well that Jan’s plan of flame-throwing cage dancers didn’t get past Health and Safety. Hopefully they are feeling better now though; we are proud of our theme and have put a lot of work into it. It was a toss up between Seven Deadly Sins and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and we’re glad we went with Sin; Fitz’s winter ball was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory themed…

Saturday. Have a meeting with Arts to see the decorations, it all looks great. Anna used to be in charge of Arts before she took on joint presidency so she is still helping out with creative stuff. Today’s task is to make  lots of clouds out of foam for the Sloth room. By the end of the day the room is so full it feels like being inside a giant candyfloss.

Sunday. We bring doughnuts to the weekly meeting to congratulate our team.  Everyone is working really hard. A debate begins over which of the Seven Deadly Shots is the nicest, our favourite is Envy. Our Arts team unveil some wanted posters they have been working on for the Speakeasy-themed bar: our faces complete with the warnings “Danger: criminally insane.” Great to see that our team knows us so well…

Churchill Spring Ball in Numbers

5000 cocktails
3500 portions of freshly prepared food
2000 boxes of Krave
1600 champagne flutes
700m of cables
400 metres of fabric
More than 170 professional and student workers
89 talented musicians
21 committee members
16 toy dogs
7 deadly sins

1 great night

If you want the chance to buy tickets and see the final Ball, book now on the Churchill Spring Ball website.