The evidence

Here are some con photos.

Four days on Raisa

Got home yesterday afternoon, after a brief post-con interlude with friends in Maidenhead, and now I feel the need to reflect on the whole puzzling Orbital experience. Puzzling because, in the main, I should not have enjoyed this, and the two other cons I have attended, anywhere near as much as I did since I am not in any way A Fan.

This is not to say that I don't like science fiction because I do, very much, and have done since my teens when I read first the excellent John Wyndham and then the less-than-excellent-and-extraordinarily-sexist Edmund Cooper, in some quantity. Fantasy too has been a occassional addition to my literary diet, beginning inevitably with LoTR at the age of about 14 and followed by a looooooooooooong dry spell until Husband introduced me to Tad Williams in 1990. However, I feel that merely liking the stuff and being A Fan of the stuff are two very different things. I can barely remember a thing about a book/film/TV episode/series once I have stopped interacting with it. For me it's all about short-term gratification - read/watch and move on. I can't recount series numbers, episode titles or plot details. I feel no sense of ownership of the characters or their millieu. If a book or episode is bad, I'm likely just to stop engaging with that author/series rather than to agonise about how the writers/producers have let us down. If characters do things that I didn't expect and don't particularly like, I may grump about it a bit but I accept that that's the way it goes with fiction sometimes. For Fans, I feel, things are very different. Which is not to say that Fan-dom is bad, just that I am different from A Fan and A Fan is different from me.

So why do I enjoy conventions so much when the whole premise of the event is that it serves Fans, a group to which I demonstrably don't belong? Answer is, I don't know. Since I am also not a particularly gregarious person, it can't be the opportunity to meet lots of people. I go to the occassional panel but am frequently confused and nonplussed by the content. I don't read an awful lot of fiction at the moment so have few favourite authors whose autographs I would seek out. I'm far too shy to get dressed up for the Masquerade. I did get involved in running the Easter day service this year, which was terrific but not unstressful.

I guess part of what I enjoy is seeing my partner and friends having such a good time - four days in the happy company of these people whom I love, admire and respect is no small treat. And I like hotel life, the self-containedness of it all, the slightly off-world feel*, the free shower caps. And when I do summon up the nerve to make conversation, I always find that very rewarding. Ultimately, I guess, it's about being part of something, no matter how peripherally, that matters to other beings. So while I a not A Fan, not part of The Tribe that Neil Gaiman talked about on Sunday, I like to think I am something of a fellow traveller.

In the world of transgender, where my research interests lie, there is a term SOFFA, standing for Significant Others, Family, Friends and Allies. Inspired by this, but not wanting to colonise someone else's discourse, I name myself a SOFTy - Significant Other/Fellow Traveller. Maybe at the next convention, if there are any other SOFTy around, we can get a drink together in the Real Ale Bar and swap stories about what it's like on our planet. Check us out with your bioscanners as you pass by - I think you'll find us harmless.

* like Raisa, while the world outside the Radisson Edwardian was harsh and forbidding, inside there was everything for pleasure!

The best bits ...

... so far:

• Joe Abercrombie (that boy will go far, mark my words)
• Frank Wu's masterly, funny and moving exposition on the resurrection in this morning's service (and he gave me a dvd - cheers chief!)
• being read to by Neil Gaiman (not alone, more's the pity - though I agree with Husband that Gaiman's leather jacket is a bit dodgy)
  
• a really good argument about the Death of the Author in the Real Ale Bar
• hotteeeze self-heating foot warmers
• men in kilts
• Adam Roberts being secretly funny
• the first half of China Mieville's exposition - and arguing about the second half later
• a nice (if expensive) pot of darjeeling in the Polo Lounge
• magic eye drops

And there's still 24 hours to go.

I like cons.

Breaking orbit

So, the time to depart for Orbital fast approches and the dreaded task of packing must be faced - the shorter the trip, the greater the stress for this clothing commitophobe! Will it be warm or cold, damp or dry? Should I take trousers or skirts and, if the latter, what colour tights? How many cardigans and pairs of shoes? Shoes! What about boots? Which boots - the red, the black, the spanish ones with buttons up the sides, the pearly purple docs? Arrrrghh!

Too. Many. Decisions.

Head!

Will!

Explode!

Small objects of desire

Am thinking of getting one of these.

Buy now or hold out for the 16gb model that is bound to come out about two weeks after I take delivery.

Ah, technology - don't you just love it!

Le weekend

Got back home lateish yesterday after a weekend of not-unalloyed joy in Brighton. Best Beloved and I both have Aged Parents who are finding their twilight years a bit of a misery, as a result not of any major illnesses but rather a growing list of pretty-much untreatable minor stuff, like persistent headaches and dodgy musculo-skeletals, coupled with somewhat of a lack of friends and hobbies. Needless to say, BB and I thus find that visiting with said APs can be slightly spirit-dampening affairs.

Having said that, we did find time this weekend past to: have three very enjoyable meals out; spend an inordinate amount of money on books; exchange presents left over from Christmas (including a rather dandy flexible keyboard on which I am now typing - so rugged that you can wash it under the tap, apparently); and buy enough material to make a couple of pairs of trousers. So not-unalloyed joy though it may have been, it was also not-unalloyed sadness.

Long-livers and floating kidneys

While Husband embarked on the first leg of his four-year walk to (a) Brighton and (b) the age of fifty, I headed down south for a bit of a visit to m' dear friend Ben the Curate, a woman born to the dog-collar if ever there was one (and not in a bad way). We had a very girly time, eating far too much chocolate, searching for shoe bargains in Leamington (Ben 0, Me 1 [a rather fetching pair of black court shoes with ickle bows on the front for a mere £12]) and watching the best part of season 3 of Scrubs. Thanks to a rather fine restaurant in Warwick, I was also able to satisfy a lifetime's love of liver, a foodstuff that is beautiful when cooked properly but is very easy to cook badly. This time it was cooked to perfection with pancetta and mash, and I ate so much of it and the pudding that followed that it felt like my eyeballs were floating on food.

And so, combining matters eccumenical and culinary/physiological, here is one of my dad's favourite jokes.

Parishioner: Vicar, would you pray for my sister's floating kidney.
Vicar: I'm sorry, but I don't think that would be appropriate.
Parishioner (chastened): Why not? After all, you prayed for all the long livers last week.

Oh, how we larfed!

Nice cuppa tea for you?

Am off to the hospital this morning. Just a minor thing but it involves a general anasthetic, so no food or drink for me until it's all over - which is why I now need a cup of tea and a bit of toast like I've never needed them in my life before!

What larks, eh, Pip!

Lost for words

So here's a thing. In our house we have not one, not two, but three Scrabble sets - a small travel set which is my personal favourite since the letters clip onto the squares and therefore cannot be dislodged by a player in a fit of pique; a big deluxe model with a turntable and all the trimmings; and a itsy-bitsy magnetic set that we frequently take with us on holiday but rarely actually play with - and yet, Husband and I sit in the same room, laptops on our knees playing Scrabulous on Facebook rather than making the effort to set up an actual real-life game. Tis madness, I tell ye!

Still, at least we're not wasting eye-power on the telly.

Reasons to love the interweb

Have just been messing about on orkut and have found this delightful piece of prose, describing a community called "Feminism is Exerbating Bulsht" (yes, really):

Feminism for long has been considered the poster boy of the upliftment of women and the betterment of society but we are finally realising that it is the plagues upon the ready that's threatening to undo all good things as we know them.

Fortunately for the literate world, this gem of a community has only 3 members. Bless!

Meanwhile in Emmerdale ...

... Jack "Born to be Riled" Sugden reels from the fallout of his exploding house - cats are out of bags, pigeons have come home to roost and pipers are about to be paid (probably in dead cats and pigeons) as one of his fire-starting offspring heads for chokey and the other yet again seeks to blame everyone else for her own wanton disregard for the safety and well-being of others (a trait she shares with, among others, our own dear ex-prime-minister Mr Tony Blair).

Still, at least the Woolpack didn't burn down this time.

Can't hold a candle to Turzo Velas

One of the many delights of our recent holiday was a visit to a little village called Turzo to buy candles. Turzo is a tiny place - not much more than ten houses and a church, plus the Turzo Velas candle factory and shop. And what a shop! It's full of the most amazing candles, all looking gorgeous and smelling like heaven. Impossible to describe it adequately, but their website will give you a ghost of an impression. And I've put up a few pix of the shop and village on Facebook.

Also, the shop man was great - dead friendly and helpful. Plus he spoke great English, which is always a humbling experience.

Stopping at Psycho Normal's House

Husband has written with his usual eloquence about our visit to the utterly lovely Casa Zalama. I meanwhile have posted a few pix of this little slice of heaven.

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig

Sometimes I think it would be better not to go on holiday. I mean, you go, you have a fabulous time and then you come back to, well, normality I suppose. And in my case, normality means emails I should have answered weeks ago, a mountain of transcribing which never seems to diminish, a house and garden in sore need of some serious tidying and the inevitable mound of post-holiday washing.

Having said that, it was an unexpectedly top-notch holiday. Everything was more than a cut above our expectations - great lodgings, terrific location, nice little hire car, yummy (and girth-increasing) food, and a visit to the tomb of El Cid (actually the tomb itself isn't very exciting, but it's a bloody lovely cathedral).

The new camera did yeoman's service - 432 shots in all, of which probably about 40 are any good - not a bad average for me, I'd have to say. Selected shots will be available for viewing just as soon as Husband gives me the flickr password.

Blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles

Over the years Husband and I have become occassionally-avid players of boardgames, favouring in particular those of a fantastic bent. Our first love was Talisman (1st edition* I think - the one where the expansion sets come in a wild variety of graphic styles and don't really fit together with the main board in any meaningful way) and we have enjoyed this in many locations with many different friends.

More recently we have become rather enamoured of Arkham Horror, a fabulously complex little beauty that has you battling co-operatively against a different one of H P Lovecraft's Great Old Ones each game. Yesterday we took on Nyarlathotep - a damned close-run thing in the end, what with one of us in the Assylum and two more barely clinging on to both sanity and stamina whilst battling hoards of nasties in the streets of Miskatonic University. With four of us in the game it took about 5 hours and many cups of tea to get the job done. Fortunately it all ended without loss of life, and a hearty and well-deserved curry was enjoyed by the victors.

* A fourth edition is due out in October - you can see an overblown and rather crap trailer for it, if you really want to waste eye-power in that way.

Who needs friends ...

... when you've got this:


Visit Friends of Mister Roy


Yep, the world of Web 2.0 sucks me even further into its gaping maw as I now ning and twitter with the best of 'em.

Frank's funeral

So, yesterday was the day of Frank's funeral and a hard day it was, but I think we gave him the best good-bye we could manage under the circumstances. My brother Ken oversaw the proceedings and friend Chris spoke with affecting wit of Frank's renaissance-man life, love of Merrydown cider and house full of musical gadgets (many of which he'd made himself), while later at the 'do' a friend from work explained the significance of pink shirts. Afterwards we talked of our beloved friend and of ourselves, swapping family news and gossip, talking about the easy stuff because the other stuff was just too hard.

And despite the utter tragedy of the whole affair, it was a day of strange, almost guilty, pleasures: meeting up with old friends, some of whom not seen for decades, and finding the old connections still intact despite my neglect; being back in my beloved Black Country and hearing my accent echoed back to me in many voices; taking tea and cake on Stourbridge High Street, familiar from the days when Roy used to live there but strangely unfamiliar too; driving through the country lanes of Shropshire, most beautiful county in England, and remembering it as our old stamping ground from the Wolverhampton days; and finally westering home up the M6 with a huge orange sun beside us and Blazin' Fiddles on the CD. Not putting the 'fun' in funeral exactly, but reminding us of our connection to life.

You've got a friend

Husband has recently been fiddling around with Facebook in an effort to understand its appeal to the Young Folk. Not wanting to be left out I done got me one o' them critters m' self.

At first I thought the whole thing was a bit (a) fatuous (b) puerile and (c) pointless, but having played with it quite a bit when I should have been transcribing interviews or reading Very Hard Books I'm really beginning to warm to it.

Strangely, since Facebook is a so-called Social Networking Site, its appeal to me is directly related to my lifelong difficulty in making friends. Because I'm articulate and funny, people mistake me for an extrovert (if that binaried nomenclature has any real validity) when I am in fact a much stranger beast, an introvert in search of an audience. This is to say, I find the company of others both frightening and draining (the more so when they are strangers) but I'm driven to perform a version of myself to entertain these fearful entities, in order to feel part of the human race.

This need to 'dance my dance' has resulted in my keeping not one but four, count 'em, four blogs (all with pretty much identical content): A Lull in the Proceedings (LJ), Thinking of Wittering (blogger), The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other (wordpress) and Celia Johnson's Enormous Face (blog.co.uk). Lull was my first foray into the blogosphere and initially the LJ friending mechanism drove me to distraction. I longed for friends but could never decipher the protocols for making it happen. I'd gaze enviously at other people's friends lists, darkly muttering 'nobody loves me, everybody hates me, going down the garden to eat worms'. Things got so bad that I had to lay off the whole blog thing for a couple of years until I'd calmed down. It only got better when I realised what I was doing and came to appreciate that, as in fleshworld, I am a creature who requires a few, close friends and a big audience.

So where does Facebook fit in? Well, with the fear of other people comes the retincence, the feeling that any personal communication from me could only ever be regarded as an impertinence and an imposition. My habit is, therefore, to lose touch with people, even those I really like, rather than engender in them an imagined irritation. Facebook, however, with its poking and message walls, aquariums and gardens, allows me to send gentle and not-very-importunate reminders of my existence that require no more response than the occassional poke back to let me know I'm still human. Furthermore, its endless array of personality-divulging titivations, which inform the world of your favourite books, films, TV show, backpacking holidays, llama farms and so on, have enormous appeal for my Inner Performer.

So now, while I still think Facebook is fatuous and puerile, I no longer think it useless.

MySpace though - that's just ugly!

Plant problems

It's a glum old day in the office this morning - everybody else is on holiday, so I am alone with just a fan heater and some ailing plants for company. My aloe vera plant, which was doing so well last year, has suddenly started to develop crispy brown bits. Could this mean it needs water? Odd, since it survived the last twelve-month on barely a teaspoon of liquid. Or am I perhaps overwatering? Eek - how do I tell? Add to this the fact that my trail-y creeper-y vine-y thing is looking a bit the worse for wear and only one conclusion is possible: I am NOT Good With Housplants.

Alternatively they might have Sick Office Syndrome. I do after all work in a location which requires cooling fans in the middle of winter and warming fan-heaters at the height of summer. Not the way to lessen our carbon footprint, is it chaps?

Something big in a small box

Last week I wrote that my friend Frank's wife had died. Over the weekend Frank died too. Official cause of death is still to be determined but we all know he died of a broken heart.

I first met Frank (whose given name was Neil) when he was 16, so I would have been 18-ish. A friend of my little brother Ken, Frank was notable for his fierce intelligence, extraordinary skill with maths, mighty sense of humour, encyclopaedic knowledge of what we would now call indie music, and for having, at 16, a full beard which made him look older than most of his teachers.

When I left University in 1979 I was honoured to join the group of Ken's friends of which Frank was a part. Together the group made regular trips to The Trumpet in Bilston, sought out the weird and wonderful pubs of the Black Country, played hide-and-seek at midnight up the top of Clent and, because Frank was married at 18 and therefore had his own place, had many wonderful parties.

Even now Frank-isms litter my speech. Because of Frank I say 'Cheers Chief' (sometimes abbreviated to 'CC'), and 'awroight maaaaayt' (trans. 'Alright mate') in an exagerated Blackheath accent. Because of Frank I call underwear 'unterwegs', and quote one of the best jokes he, or anyone, ever made: 'Ah, the badger's sett ... but the weasel's still a bit runny'.

He shaped my musical tastes as well. With him I went to see The Fall, and The Residents (speculating in the pub afterwards that under those enormous eyeballs lurked Eric Clapton, George Harrison or other rock legends). He lent me bootlegs Elvis Costello tapes and introduced me to Little Feat. And because of Frank I listened far too many times to a rather odd piece of contemporary clasical music called The Sinking of the Titanic, which he used to play as a way of getting rid of people at the end of a party.

In the early 80s he invited me to sing in The Leisure Pets with him and Paul and the drum machine (called Ronnie) - I was pretty rubbish really but Frank let me keep on singing. So, fragments of his songs are part of my consciousness too: 'son, don't vote - they all make you wear funny coloured shirts'; 'something small in a big box'; 'pointless packaging'; and the drum machine programmed to sound like the steam hammer at Lench's chain works.

So, even though I haven't seen him since we moved north, there he is, fragments of Frank cropping up in everything I do - sadly missed but never forgotten.

Frank Skidmore
Rest in peace, m' dear old thing