When we first knew that we’d be going to Interaction (about two instants after the bid was declared), Peter and I immediately made an agreement that we wouldn’t be doing any programming whatsoever. Last time we were at a Glasgow Worldcon, in 1995, as ToastMr. & Mrs. we spent so much time rehearsing for the Hugos, and rehearsing for rehearsals, and doing programming, and squiring Peter’s mother here and there, and generally running around going nuts, that we came home too exhausted for words, and without having seen anything like as many friends as we’d hoped to. This Glasgow Worldcon, we swore, was for chatting and lounging and hugging people.
And sure enough, after the madness of ’95, ’05 was much more about the chatting/lounging/hugging dynamic… though we still didn’t get to hug as many people as we wanted to. Some Worldcons (last year in Boston, for example) have some space or well-trodden area where, if you just sit there long enough, everybody in the convention will eventually pass by. If there was one of these at Glasgow
(possibly in the SECC?), we missed it. Never mind: we saw a whole lotta people. And had the intense pleasure of knowing that a number of friends had won Hugos, (congrats, Sue, congrats, Charlie, congrats, Ron, congrats as usual, Dave!…), giving us reasons to hug them all over again.
There were a number of good dinners (with Peter’s editors at DAW, with the noble Neil Walker and the excellent Alan and Colette, with Brian Nisbet, with Jim and Abby…) and a whole bunch of long chats in the Moat House bar, and also many, many pints of real ale: good stuff for Peter, but maybe not so much for me (in that the yeasts associated with the Reality of the ale usually leave me with a condition Peter kindly describes as “the horns of Elfland faintly blowing”. I relapsed to wine pretty quickly). Nonetheless, if the ale produces effects like those shown in the Flickr photoset I’ll link to shortly, in which P. is repeatedly seen to be in congress with the fan lounge’s inflatable shark, I guess it can’t be all bad.
Our stay was shorter than previously expected, as previously blogged: Pip the new kitten was too small to leave alone at home with the other cats as yet, and we didn’t
want to leave him in the kennel for any longer than absolutely necessary. So we arrived only on Saturday and headed home again on Tuesday — sad not to have seen everybody we’d have liked to, but happy enough to have seen those we did.
And thereby hangs a tale about which I’ll have to add more details later. While waiting for our luggage at Dublin Airport, a small child doing a LeMans number with a loaded luggage cart lost control of it and slammed the low front of the cart into my left lower leg, crunching it between his cart and our own, which was at that point braced against one of those curved metal shields they’ve just erected around the ends of the luggage carousels. I’m getting X-rayed tomorrow. But the consensus is already that, whether anything’s actually broken or not — and on sight of the way the ankle almost instantly swelled up, both the emergency medtechs and our own GP made that sucking-in-the-breath sound that plumbers and auto mechanics make when something is seriously wrong and is really going to cost you — there is certainly some external bone damage typical of a crushing injury, and also crushed and possibly torn ligaments: so that I’m going to have to stay off the left foot/ankle as much as possible for the next six weeks. (Which, considering how I feel at the moment even when the painkillers kick in, is not something I’m much going to mind. At the moment I have to go up and down the stairs sideways, hanging onto the bannister like a two-year-old.) I said to our doctor, “But I have to be in Seattle in September…!” and he just shook his head at me and said, “Out of the question.”
So…so much for CascadiaCon, which we were really looking forward to. So much for the September West-Coast microtour for Wizards at War: that’s going to have to be rescheduled into October sometime, the parts of it that still can be (and some parts, like the Pacific Northwest booksellers’ conference, can’t). So much for our nonrefundable tickets (which theoretically our travel insurance will cover, but not without the usual interminable delays). Dammit. Fooey. Argh.
(sigh) At least the kitten is in good shape. And (the slightest sour amusement) at least they’ve taken the bloody charge-you-a-Euro slots off the airport luggage carts.
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wow
wow.
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