Discworld Convention 2016
Not many people do a full Convention report nowadays. But I am a Discworld/afp dinosaur, so here it is, behind the cut. People not familiar with Livejournal, click on 'see more'...
Friday
Set off fairly early, getting a lift with Gaz Hunter and extracting a promise from him not to do anything that might aggravate the after-effects of his recent bike crash. It felt quite odd not having Gaz’s dog Seren in the back as we do when we travel to Mitch Benn’s Distraction Club, and I turned around to talk to her a few times. Which is how I found myself saying “Who’s a lovely girl?” to my suitcase...
Arrived at the hotel at around the same time as Random C and her amazing multi-coloured hair. Pinks, oranges, dark pinks, blonde. I admired the hotel and the sunshine, and went looking for friends to hug.
Amongst all the people I hadn’t seen in two years, the first one I made straight for was AdrianO who I see every few weeks for comedy clubbing... I sat and chatted to him, Leo Breebart, CTony and Mole, and managed to get Leo to join the Guild of Funk. We agreed a Guild of Disco would have been good too. Mole gave me a bag of stuff to take to the Hedgehog Party. I made an entirely empty threat to drink the Metaxa :-)
My room was the only convention hotel room I’ve had so far with a nice view :-) I dropped my stuff and went in search of more people.
The Opening Ceremony takes place at 5 o’clock nowadays - it used to be more like 8-ish. I found having a blue dot for the first time really valuable. It meant I could take a place on the end of a row in case claustrophobia struck. As Rob Wilkins pointed out, it was a really short Opening Ceremony - not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but maybe a bit disappointing for the newbies. Good video clip of Rob in the role of Marty McFly from Back To The Future.
I found Jan and Nigel Uzzell with Bethan and Alex out on the benches in the sunshine. Nigel, being a generally good sport, was dressed as Princess Fluffy, a character his family bestowed on him a while back. This included a pink tutu and t-shirt, pink tights and a pink fluffy umbrella. Jan was in her Dame Gigli costume, Bethan as a Pirate King, and Alex not in costume....yet... At one point we were ‘reverse robbed’, meaning two people carrying a (pretend) crossbow came and gave us things (badges and Discworld bracelets). In Jan’s words, “I feel as if I’ve been violated, but in a good way...”
The food at the restaurant was good. It was really expensive, but hotel restaurants being expensive is a fact of life, so kudos to the committee for negotiating it down from the original price. The buffet format reminded me of holidays a little bit. The cakes were really good.
I don’t generally go to Rob’s Bedtime stories, so I spent some time getting my bearings and went to wait for the Karaoke, which was great fun once it started. People joined in well, and this was mostly kicked off by Davina who piled straight in. At one point I also said hi to Farley Fantastique who I’ve known for a while on Facebook but hadn’t yet met. I was too tired to think of joining in with the karaoke, but really enjoyed watching it.
Saturday
Traditional full English convention breakfast! Eaten with a table full of friends, which made it even better.
After breakfast I went to the Guild of Funk meeting, which confirmed my usual theory that a) there are some people who are really good at guild stuff, and b) I am not one of them! There was supposedly going to be a ‘One Nation Under A Crinoline’ where Torak was to wear the crinoline on his head and as many people as possible tried to fit underneath it. I don’t know if this happened. I hope it did!
I ducked out of the rest of the Guild meeting in favour of a swim. I had been really looking forward to using the swimming pool and really enjoyed it. The pool was very pleasant and I thought of how much my Mum - also a keen swimmer - would enjoy it. Maybe there’s a similar hotel in Leicestershire... I also used the steam room, for all of five minutes. It got a bit boring sitting in there when there was a lovely swimming pool a few feet away!
I went to the ‘Good Vibrations, Bad Vibes’ panel. This is one panel I think Pterry himself would have found really interesting. In all the love we rightly show to Discworld, we forget that we’re allowed to talk about the bits we’re not so keen on as well. I unfortunately forgot the sophorific (is that the right word for making you sleepy?) effect that listening to panels has on my brain, regardless of how interesting they are (and this one was). Now I remember, it happened in both of Ben Aaronovitch’s equally interesting panels in the 2014 Convention as well. No reflection on the panels themselves, which were great.
So, black coffee and then Stephen Briggs’s interview with Rob Wilkins. Which had the same effect, especially in a warm dark room. When I realised I hadn’t taken in anything Rob had said for the last ten minutes, I had to wander off for fresh air and, eventually, a nap. (Again, no reflection on Stephen and Rob who were both interesting and funny)
At some point I had food with the Uzzells, and admired Alex’s impressive zombie costume. His character had a full backstory and he was handing out cards for The Fresh Start Club, in a suitably gravelly zombie voice. Excellent stuff.
I was glad that Abigail Tyrell’s Corset Making item didn’t have the same effect on me as the earlier panels. I had been looking forward to that one, despite having no intention of ever making a corset (it looks expensive, and also I like to be able to bend!) it was really interesting to see how they are made and fitted. Abigail’s model was author Diane Dwayne, who didn’t seem to mind bits of her being tugged around!
The Maskerade was great. My favourites were probably Roy Ayres with The Bursar, and Jen Austen with The Dark Morris, which went on to win. Roy’s act was awarded a prize for (I may have the wording wrong here) Creative Silliness, which is quite an accolade at a Convention full of Creative Silliness of all sorts!
The Hedgehog Party is always the event I look forward to the most :-) Cheesy music, interesting food and the opportunity to dance with a load of like-minded people. Sabremeister Brian was DJ, and did a great job - he knew to wait until people had explored the food and unusual flavours of vodka, before playing the big dancing numbers like the Time Warp. People’s reactions once they heard the first few notes of the Time Warp made me grin - especially Kirstine Heald who nearly fell out of the chair she was sitting in at the time! Gideon Hallet didn’t have his traditional shiny costume, but was the life and soul of the party nonetheless. Well, one of them - this was a party with many lifes and souls. At one point Billy Idol’s White Wedding was played, and some of the Game of Thrones fans started singing ‘Red Wedding’ instead... We danced and had a great time until two in the morning, at which point everyone pitched in with the clearing up. The leftover food went to Ops, who I’m sure made good use of it (including giving it to the Dead Monkey Party goers on Monday as usual) Great night :-)
Sunday
After breakfast, I went and had a look in the dealers’ room, and found that there was a stall I hadn’t seen before, namely one full of really cheap secondhand books. I found three of the Game of Thrones books there for 50p each. I enjoyed Discworld Book Club, which had four previous Committee members talking about their favourite Discworld books. Adora (Pam and Daniel’s dog) joined in the applause afterwards.
I managed to fit a nap in before the events I wanted to see later in the day, as I was really knackered from the Hedgehog Party the night before. After that, I went to see Strangely Fascinating, which was like a sort Discworld-linked QI. Good fun. I caught some of Buckle and Swash and about five minutes of Mark Reads From His Writing.
I think Sunday night (apart from the Toast and Jam) was the only bit of this convention that slightly suffered by comparison with the 2014 convention. (I must point out that this was on a personal level, not Convention-wide). In 2014, Sunday evening was spent having fish finger sandwiches in the cellar bar of that year’s hotel with about twenty-five of my friends, and then chatting in the bar with various groups of friends until about 3 a.m. This time, there seemed to be no-one I knew around so I ate in the hotel restaurant. I believe some of my friends went out for a meal but unfortunately I didn’t hear about it until after they got back. The food in the hotel restaurant was nice though.
The Toast and Jam was one of the best I had seen for years. Also, on the way down there, I found some of the free wine that the Gala Dinner goers had left behind... There was a great turnout and a lot of enthusiastic joining-in. I think a fair amount of the joiners-in were newbies, which was really good to see. People brought their own guitars. A couple of rather talented women who were songwriters were singing their own songs. Two young chaps dressed as dapper assassins had a couple of filks they’d written on the journey to the convention. Trialia sung folk songs, and it was great to hear Kathleen Jowitt sing (the last time I heard her sing was the afpcamp in 2009). Rosemary had a cautionary tale of ‘Never Marry A Mermaid’, and at one point Torak took over the drums so AdrianO could sing ‘Biko’, which has become a good Toast and Jam tradition in the same way as Menno singing Tom Lehrer songs or Eric doing his favourite ‘Soul Happy Hour’. Menno also did his version of ‘Black Is The Colour’, and Matthew Holland made a good job of overseeing the event as well as playing guitar and singing. All great fun :-)
When the Toast and Jam had wound down, I went to watch the live band. They weren’t to my taste, so I didn’t watch them for long, but a lot of people seemed to be enjoying it. There were some card games in Upper Broadway in full swing. I went to look in the bar, hoping to find some of my friends to chat to, but couldn’t find any around at that point. So it was a case of wafting around the hotel looking for stuff to do, or wandering off back to my room. Eventually, I reluctantly went back to my room, feeling really disappointed with myself for doing so at just half past midnight on a Convention Sunday! But there was tea.
Monday
Monday made up for not being able to find anyone to chat to the previous night. The bar was full of people I knew all day, which was great. There weren’t any events I wanted to go to for most of the day, so I made the most of chatting to friends I knew I probably wouldn’t see again for another two years (apart from the small gang of Distraction Club goers, a lot of whom I’ve already seen again this week!)
The Discworld Play, Witches Abroad The Musical, was really enjoyable. All the cast were great, they brought their roles to life really well, and I think Tony Perkins (have I got the right name there?) made a hilarious Gytha Ogg. Great fun all round.
The Closing Ceremony was made even more fun by finding myself in amongst two rows of afpers. Time for a photo opportunity! We all look happy in the photo. I hope we all were. I certainly was :-)
I was getting a lift back with Gaz Hunter, but neither of us were quite ready to go home yet, so we went back to the bar for another hour or so. This gave us time for more chatting and hugging people, and also gave me time to fit in another bacon bap :-) There's always time for more bacon... We eventually called it a night at about 7.00, meaning we didn't go to the Dead Monkey Party (I usually don't, as I've usually run out of energy by then), but I heard it went with a swing, which was good to hear.
A couple of things I couldn’t fit into the description above....
I would be quite happy to be in this hotel again. I know a lot of others feel the same.
There were a lot of people conspicuous by their absence this year, who weren’t at the Convention due to being busy doing other stuff. A lot of people I talked to said that the ‘people we’ve known for ages quota’ was getting lower every year as people move on to different things, which is part of the nature of events like this. But on the other side, it was great to see so many new people who, happily, also seem to totally get Discworld and the convention. Despite Terry no longer being around, the convention is very much alive and kicking and looks set to continue, hopefully for many years.
This is the bit where we thank the Committee, Tech and Ops, without whom none of it would have happened. Thanks all of you.
Friday
Set off fairly early, getting a lift with Gaz Hunter and extracting a promise from him not to do anything that might aggravate the after-effects of his recent bike crash. It felt quite odd not having Gaz’s dog Seren in the back as we do when we travel to Mitch Benn’s Distraction Club, and I turned around to talk to her a few times. Which is how I found myself saying “Who’s a lovely girl?” to my suitcase...
Arrived at the hotel at around the same time as Random C and her amazing multi-coloured hair. Pinks, oranges, dark pinks, blonde. I admired the hotel and the sunshine, and went looking for friends to hug.
Amongst all the people I hadn’t seen in two years, the first one I made straight for was AdrianO who I see every few weeks for comedy clubbing... I sat and chatted to him, Leo Breebart, CTony and Mole, and managed to get Leo to join the Guild of Funk. We agreed a Guild of Disco would have been good too. Mole gave me a bag of stuff to take to the Hedgehog Party. I made an entirely empty threat to drink the Metaxa :-)
My room was the only convention hotel room I’ve had so far with a nice view :-) I dropped my stuff and went in search of more people.
The Opening Ceremony takes place at 5 o’clock nowadays - it used to be more like 8-ish. I found having a blue dot for the first time really valuable. It meant I could take a place on the end of a row in case claustrophobia struck. As Rob Wilkins pointed out, it was a really short Opening Ceremony - not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but maybe a bit disappointing for the newbies. Good video clip of Rob in the role of Marty McFly from Back To The Future.
I found Jan and Nigel Uzzell with Bethan and Alex out on the benches in the sunshine. Nigel, being a generally good sport, was dressed as Princess Fluffy, a character his family bestowed on him a while back. This included a pink tutu and t-shirt, pink tights and a pink fluffy umbrella. Jan was in her Dame Gigli costume, Bethan as a Pirate King, and Alex not in costume....yet... At one point we were ‘reverse robbed’, meaning two people carrying a (pretend) crossbow came and gave us things (badges and Discworld bracelets). In Jan’s words, “I feel as if I’ve been violated, but in a good way...”
The food at the restaurant was good. It was really expensive, but hotel restaurants being expensive is a fact of life, so kudos to the committee for negotiating it down from the original price. The buffet format reminded me of holidays a little bit. The cakes were really good.
I don’t generally go to Rob’s Bedtime stories, so I spent some time getting my bearings and went to wait for the Karaoke, which was great fun once it started. People joined in well, and this was mostly kicked off by Davina who piled straight in. At one point I also said hi to Farley Fantastique who I’ve known for a while on Facebook but hadn’t yet met. I was too tired to think of joining in with the karaoke, but really enjoyed watching it.
Saturday
Traditional full English convention breakfast! Eaten with a table full of friends, which made it even better.
After breakfast I went to the Guild of Funk meeting, which confirmed my usual theory that a) there are some people who are really good at guild stuff, and b) I am not one of them! There was supposedly going to be a ‘One Nation Under A Crinoline’ where Torak was to wear the crinoline on his head and as many people as possible tried to fit underneath it. I don’t know if this happened. I hope it did!
I ducked out of the rest of the Guild meeting in favour of a swim. I had been really looking forward to using the swimming pool and really enjoyed it. The pool was very pleasant and I thought of how much my Mum - also a keen swimmer - would enjoy it. Maybe there’s a similar hotel in Leicestershire... I also used the steam room, for all of five minutes. It got a bit boring sitting in there when there was a lovely swimming pool a few feet away!
I went to the ‘Good Vibrations, Bad Vibes’ panel. This is one panel I think Pterry himself would have found really interesting. In all the love we rightly show to Discworld, we forget that we’re allowed to talk about the bits we’re not so keen on as well. I unfortunately forgot the sophorific (is that the right word for making you sleepy?) effect that listening to panels has on my brain, regardless of how interesting they are (and this one was). Now I remember, it happened in both of Ben Aaronovitch’s equally interesting panels in the 2014 Convention as well. No reflection on the panels themselves, which were great.
So, black coffee and then Stephen Briggs’s interview with Rob Wilkins. Which had the same effect, especially in a warm dark room. When I realised I hadn’t taken in anything Rob had said for the last ten minutes, I had to wander off for fresh air and, eventually, a nap. (Again, no reflection on Stephen and Rob who were both interesting and funny)
At some point I had food with the Uzzells, and admired Alex’s impressive zombie costume. His character had a full backstory and he was handing out cards for The Fresh Start Club, in a suitably gravelly zombie voice. Excellent stuff.
I was glad that Abigail Tyrell’s Corset Making item didn’t have the same effect on me as the earlier panels. I had been looking forward to that one, despite having no intention of ever making a corset (it looks expensive, and also I like to be able to bend!) it was really interesting to see how they are made and fitted. Abigail’s model was author Diane Dwayne, who didn’t seem to mind bits of her being tugged around!
The Maskerade was great. My favourites were probably Roy Ayres with The Bursar, and Jen Austen with The Dark Morris, which went on to win. Roy’s act was awarded a prize for (I may have the wording wrong here) Creative Silliness, which is quite an accolade at a Convention full of Creative Silliness of all sorts!
The Hedgehog Party is always the event I look forward to the most :-) Cheesy music, interesting food and the opportunity to dance with a load of like-minded people. Sabremeister Brian was DJ, and did a great job - he knew to wait until people had explored the food and unusual flavours of vodka, before playing the big dancing numbers like the Time Warp. People’s reactions once they heard the first few notes of the Time Warp made me grin - especially Kirstine Heald who nearly fell out of the chair she was sitting in at the time! Gideon Hallet didn’t have his traditional shiny costume, but was the life and soul of the party nonetheless. Well, one of them - this was a party with many lifes and souls. At one point Billy Idol’s White Wedding was played, and some of the Game of Thrones fans started singing ‘Red Wedding’ instead... We danced and had a great time until two in the morning, at which point everyone pitched in with the clearing up. The leftover food went to Ops, who I’m sure made good use of it (including giving it to the Dead Monkey Party goers on Monday as usual) Great night :-)
Sunday
After breakfast, I went and had a look in the dealers’ room, and found that there was a stall I hadn’t seen before, namely one full of really cheap secondhand books. I found three of the Game of Thrones books there for 50p each. I enjoyed Discworld Book Club, which had four previous Committee members talking about their favourite Discworld books. Adora (Pam and Daniel’s dog) joined in the applause afterwards.
I managed to fit a nap in before the events I wanted to see later in the day, as I was really knackered from the Hedgehog Party the night before. After that, I went to see Strangely Fascinating, which was like a sort Discworld-linked QI. Good fun. I caught some of Buckle and Swash and about five minutes of Mark Reads From His Writing.
I think Sunday night (apart from the Toast and Jam) was the only bit of this convention that slightly suffered by comparison with the 2014 convention. (I must point out that this was on a personal level, not Convention-wide). In 2014, Sunday evening was spent having fish finger sandwiches in the cellar bar of that year’s hotel with about twenty-five of my friends, and then chatting in the bar with various groups of friends until about 3 a.m. This time, there seemed to be no-one I knew around so I ate in the hotel restaurant. I believe some of my friends went out for a meal but unfortunately I didn’t hear about it until after they got back. The food in the hotel restaurant was nice though.
The Toast and Jam was one of the best I had seen for years. Also, on the way down there, I found some of the free wine that the Gala Dinner goers had left behind... There was a great turnout and a lot of enthusiastic joining-in. I think a fair amount of the joiners-in were newbies, which was really good to see. People brought their own guitars. A couple of rather talented women who were songwriters were singing their own songs. Two young chaps dressed as dapper assassins had a couple of filks they’d written on the journey to the convention. Trialia sung folk songs, and it was great to hear Kathleen Jowitt sing (the last time I heard her sing was the afpcamp in 2009). Rosemary had a cautionary tale of ‘Never Marry A Mermaid’, and at one point Torak took over the drums so AdrianO could sing ‘Biko’, which has become a good Toast and Jam tradition in the same way as Menno singing Tom Lehrer songs or Eric doing his favourite ‘Soul Happy Hour’. Menno also did his version of ‘Black Is The Colour’, and Matthew Holland made a good job of overseeing the event as well as playing guitar and singing. All great fun :-)
When the Toast and Jam had wound down, I went to watch the live band. They weren’t to my taste, so I didn’t watch them for long, but a lot of people seemed to be enjoying it. There were some card games in Upper Broadway in full swing. I went to look in the bar, hoping to find some of my friends to chat to, but couldn’t find any around at that point. So it was a case of wafting around the hotel looking for stuff to do, or wandering off back to my room. Eventually, I reluctantly went back to my room, feeling really disappointed with myself for doing so at just half past midnight on a Convention Sunday! But there was tea.
Monday
Monday made up for not being able to find anyone to chat to the previous night. The bar was full of people I knew all day, which was great. There weren’t any events I wanted to go to for most of the day, so I made the most of chatting to friends I knew I probably wouldn’t see again for another two years (apart from the small gang of Distraction Club goers, a lot of whom I’ve already seen again this week!)
The Discworld Play, Witches Abroad The Musical, was really enjoyable. All the cast were great, they brought their roles to life really well, and I think Tony Perkins (have I got the right name there?) made a hilarious Gytha Ogg. Great fun all round.
The Closing Ceremony was made even more fun by finding myself in amongst two rows of afpers. Time for a photo opportunity! We all look happy in the photo. I hope we all were. I certainly was :-)
I was getting a lift back with Gaz Hunter, but neither of us were quite ready to go home yet, so we went back to the bar for another hour or so. This gave us time for more chatting and hugging people, and also gave me time to fit in another bacon bap :-) There's always time for more bacon... We eventually called it a night at about 7.00, meaning we didn't go to the Dead Monkey Party (I usually don't, as I've usually run out of energy by then), but I heard it went with a swing, which was good to hear.
A couple of things I couldn’t fit into the description above....
I would be quite happy to be in this hotel again. I know a lot of others feel the same.
There were a lot of people conspicuous by their absence this year, who weren’t at the Convention due to being busy doing other stuff. A lot of people I talked to said that the ‘people we’ve known for ages quota’ was getting lower every year as people move on to different things, which is part of the nature of events like this. But on the other side, it was great to see so many new people who, happily, also seem to totally get Discworld and the convention. Despite Terry no longer being around, the convention is very much alive and kicking and looks set to continue, hopefully for many years.
This is the bit where we thank the Committee, Tech and Ops, without whom none of it would have happened. Thanks all of you.