What I Did On My Holidays... Part 1.

[curiouswombat]

I got home last night, and it feels as though I've been away for months rather than just over a week. And, at the moment, the most noticeable thing I did on my holiday was caught a cold! So I am feeling rather ropey.

Mind you I seem to have arrived home to winter, anyway, so a cold seems reasonable.

Honestly - the sun was shining when I got home last night - but it now so dark, wet, and gloomy that, at 4.15 in the afternoon, I have the light beside me on.

Anyway - back to the trip, and back to last weekend in Coventry.


The fandom get-together that is WriterConUK was our reason for leaving the island, of course. S2C and I had a perfectly uneventful journey to Coventry and our dear friend gillo met us at the railway station and chauffeured us to the hotel. S2C had realised that upgrading was not terrible expensive - and so we had a room suite with a separate living room and even a tiny kitchen area with a fridge and microwave. This is less extravagant than it at first appears - he tends to wake much earlier than I do and a separate sitting area allows him to put on the light, read, write and so on without disturbing me. But the fridge came in very useful for storing gillo's stash of wine for us all to share!

This is the view from our sitting area -



daiseechain arrived a little after us, and we all went to Gill's to sort out last minute stuff... like making the personalised delegate badges and doing the goody bags! I must say I had had fun choosing pictures to insert in fridge magnets, drinks mats, rulers, and bottle openers according to people's chosen fandoms - but actually putting it all together took time. Mind you I think I had the easiest task - Gill was busy ironing the logo onto calico bags, and Daisee was tasked with the hardest job of all, which was inserting the printed strips into the pens!

Eventually Gill took us back tot he Ramada when I think we all staggered to bed exhausted, but the bags were ready to just have the sweeties added when bogwitch arrived the next day. We expressed our admiration that she had done goody bags all by herself, and she expressed her amazement that we were mad enough to try doing it in such a hurry as she, sensibly, had taken months over them!

Fortunately the badges and bags were well received by everyone who was there! Sadly this was a smaller number than usual - at 16 we were just at break-even point but, even more important, if there had been fewer it would have been less a mini-convention than a bunch of mates meeting for a drink.

However - there were enough of us for it to be really good fun, and for the ice-breaker quiz to be as highly competitive as usual!

The hotel fed us well - and set up a long table in the dining room for us for dinner on Friday which they then left in place so we could gather around it and gossip together over breakfasts, too.

We had a day of fascinating talks on Saturday - everything from using art and fic to work together, to costuming. Daisee is going to post the talks on the Community LJ, and huntingospray is going to sort out the website, when they will then be posted there. But a few interesting snippets; has it occurred to you that 'Elementary' and 'Sherlock' arrived on the scene more or less together because of the date Conan Doyle died? Or that many of the 'guides to writing' are designed for script-writers and so are not really applicable to writing to be read rather than watched? Or even how hard it might be to get through a door whilst inside a Transformer' costume...

The hotel kept us supplied with a wide choice of coffees, hot chocolates and teas, and comestibles, to keep our strength up...



There were 3 trays like that between us for our afternoon break!

There had been plans for Chaos Costuming after dinner - but the food was so good (even picky eater S2C agreed it was!), and the conversation flowed so well, especially with cocktails and wine, that in the end we just all sat around the breakout area and talked the night away.

Sunday morning saw the AGM of the group - and the committee asking people to consider, seriously, was it worth keeping going if the numbers continued to go down. The answer is that we will organise another event next year - with the proviso that if not enough people sign up it will not go ahead - and with new committee member tlanti having access to an up-to-date convention calendar the committee will choose the date to clash with as little as possible, as doing it with an LJ poll to choose the date really isn't working; even people who chose the date we used didn't manage to get to it in the end, as things change.

So - those of you who fancy the idea of coming, but have never made it - please do try to come next year as, otherwise, this may have been the last one, or that might be!

OK - end of commercial!

Also on Sunday morning we hold what is euphemistically called the raffle. Everyone brings something, or more than one something, of a fannish nature, or just something nice, or interesting, they think someone else might like, and they go on the big table. Everyone has a numbered ticket in their goody bag - and as our chair person draws out the tickets we go up in order to pick something. And sometimes we get through 2 or 3 rounds...

Here is the table;



Where else might you have the chance to go home with the latest Ben Aaronovitch, a dwarven axe, a Doctor Who Tardis van Gogh poster, or a copy of the Magna Carta? Or even a bottle of wine or a paint your own Snape kit?




Many farewells said, the numbers slowly dwindled - and, leaving my husband to make his own way home next morning, I set off for the station to head to London for a few days - of which there will be more in the next couple of days!

Comments

[wildecate.livejournal.com]

I will start saving!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Hurrah!