Collectormania 7 - the con report

[raven]

Collectormania 7, kids. I am no con virgin, me – this is my fourth, and Clare’s fifth and Colleen’s sixth – however, we took Enid and Hannah along this time in order to pop their con-cherries, as Colleen so delightfully put it. So I give you the ordinary cast list – Colleen and Clare are hathy_col and osiris13, the Lesbian Odd Couple and along with me, the original Convention Three (as Clare said, Enid Blyton just never got around to writing about us), Enid and Hannah are balthaser and purplerainbow and the convention n00bs.

There are others, of course – day-guests and Americans and other aliens – but that’s where we begin.

Friday - “A friend with breasts and all the rest / A friend who’s dressed in leather...”

I tell most people who ask that I live in Liverpool, but that isn’t actually the case; I live in a small coastal village about fifteen miles north. Because we all do live fairly far apart, we met at Conway Park at four o’clock precisely, except for Colleen who got stuck at Hamilton Square, and were on the road by half past, complete with loud music and achingly beautiful sunshine.

As usual, the con was in Milton Keynes. I know I do this every time, but I’m now going to quote Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman yet again:

“Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be a modern, efficient, healthy and, all in all, pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.”

As did we. But before we got there, we had to drive all the way down the M6, then lots of the way down the M1 (or maybe the other way round). Clare drove, Colleen navigated, while Enid, Hannah and me made helpful noises and sang along to the music. According to Clare, the fact he had five people and a whole load of luggage inside made Ron physically unable to accelerate; that said, we actually made good time. We stopped for the first time after about an hour, for coffee and sandwiches and heckling Michael Howard.

[Clare driving:



Colleen navigating:



Us making helpful noises:



There was a Costa Coffee there, and Hannah had frescatto number one of the weekend. It was vanilla and I had most of it. Following that, we hit the road again and weren’t going to stop, excepting the fact I had to pee. I communicated this subtly to the driver and navigator (who commented, “The road goes ever on and ever on and ever on… except when you have to pee!”) who stopped with minimal griping. While we were there, I discovered that the Mars Delight I had bought and secreted in my left jeans pocket some hours earlier had obligingly melted. Amid a chorus of my wailing (“I have to wash my pockets out!”) we moved on once more.

We were listening to rather a lot of Placebo on this trip. Pure Morning is an old favourite of mine, but it’s been given added fannish weight by Colleen’s and my discovery of this brilliant default icon and the relevance of the line, “A friend with breasts and all the rest / A friend who’s dressed in leather” to a certain Het Pairing That Ate The Slash Fandom. I have a horrible feeling we merely bemused everyone else in the car.

And approximately four hours after departing from sunny Birkenhead, we arrived in the city of roundabouts and found the hotel without getting lost once, cue applause for Colleen. The other cause for applause was a new, pre-alcohol theory she propounded: as we all know by virtue of the aforementioned Pterry and Gneil, the M25 is a source of evil because it is secretly the same shape as the dread occult symbol odegra, in which case all roundabouts are made in the shape of it, which is why places with lots of them, like Milton Keynes and Skem (Skelmersdale – proto-Milton-Keynes, not far from here) are so intrinsically evil.

I’m sure it made sense at the time.

So we found the hotel, danced the dance of not-having-five-people-in-a-three-person-room-oh-dear-me-no (it involves hiding behind cars and behind pot plants) and settled down to a girlie night in. We spent £11.67 on vodka, milk and Oasis as a mixer (we couldn’t find orange juice) and went back to the hotel to drink it, eat Pot Noodles and giggle fannishly. All in all, it was a good night; we all went to bed at around one in the morning, ready for an early start in the morning.

Saturday - The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Radio Telescopes

In a twist of weirdness quite unmatched before or since, we got up before the alarm. Colleen was first to launch herself at the shower while someone else made a cup of coffee and wafted it under my nose before disappearing. I sat up to look at a curiously dreamlike, early-morning grey room, muttering, “Coffee. Coffee.”

Clare laughed at me. “Thank your girlfriend.”

I did, clambering out of bed and wandering into the bathroom (no, Colleen was not in there) only to find I had mislaid both toothbrush and comb. This is a worrying trend – I lose a comb at every convention (I had Colleen searching for my comb mere hours after having met her) – and it is not conducive to my continued mental health. After making puppy-dog eyes at Hannah, I eventually acquired said items and got dressed to an accompaniment of kids’ telly. Enid loves early morning kids’ stuff – we watched a dreadful cartoon with the same characters as The Mummy Returns and enjoyed it thoroughly. I did look inquiringly at the channels we were receiving, and without my having to ask, Colleen told me, “No, we don’t get UKGold.”

“Shame,” I said. “We could have seen the Fourth Doctor fall off a radio telescope.”

“What was he doing on a radio telescope?” asked Clare suddenly.

“Saving the universe, I guess.”

“He can’t climb onto a radio telescope!” she told me, and in the rant that followed, I gradually became aware that while most people were worrying about the welfare of the Time Lord, there was an injured party with not nearly enough attention being paid to it: the radio telescope itself.

“But he was saving the universe!” I complained.

“The acid in his fingers would damage the surface of it,” she said, ignoring me entirely, and I decided, as all wise fangirls do, that this was an argument beyond my limited capability.

Thanks to Ron and some more skilled navigation, we were at the convention centre in good time. We entered through the side-entrance, and this is the very first thing that happened after that:



I think I said, “Squee.” And then we bounded up to get our pictures taken with it. I peered inside, as you do, and said, disappointedly, “It’s smaller on the inside than on the outside.”

Colleen nodded, Hannah took the picture, and I turned round. And screamed, while everyone else laughed at me; the man inside stepped out and said, “You know, I’m not that scary.”

Note the scarf. I wasn’t wearing a costume – didn’t really have the time to make one, this time – but as I said later, there was no harm in projecting a healthy impression of eccentricity, hence the incredibly long scarf, jellybabies and ‘Dalek Virgin’ badge. More on that anon.

We also met a Cyberman –



-and Hannah met Kali Rocha-



-who was apparently Halfrek in Buffy. At which point, it was time for us to meet amchau at Costa, and sit down and have coffee and frescattos. (A frescatto is a drink made of ice and sugar and occasionally caramel, and is rather nice.) I gave her her Christmas present, finally, and she fed us peanuts, having arrived with enough food to outdo Scott of the Antarctic. Here we are, not getting thrown out:



The first guest I met was Katee Sackhoff, the one and only Starbuck, and she was lovely.. We didn’t get much time to talk to her or take pictures, but she chatted and giggled and looked suitably askance when I offered her a jellybaby – “I have no idea what these are!”



I didn’t explain about Tom Baker or the scarf or the significance of the jellybabies. It seemed a recipe for catastrophe. In any case, Saturday was our day of American fandom – we did all the British guests the day after, with the exception of Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy, natch). Hannah wanted to meet him because he looks just like her younger brother, who is also Tom.



Then, lunch, which was delightfully healthy and involved chips and mayonnaise, eaten out by the fountain while Enid took pictures. I particularly like this one of the three new_who mods:



From left, amchau, the sane maintainer (one look at the hat and that’s all you need to know), me (loneraven - tech!mod>) and hathy_col (small, fluffy, intrinsically evil).

We’re eating jellybabies, but I don’t think you can see them. By that time I was running out of them anyway (I got through four packets over the weekend). They proved even more significant later on, as we walked back through to the dealers’ bit, and got molested by Daleks! It was the best thing ever. There were three of them, life-size and rolling around, with horrifyingly accurate voices: “EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!”



And even though we are babies of the eighties and weren’t bred with the instinctive fear, they still had their moments of being fucking scary. Am-Chau got one of them to start yelling, “PEACE AND LOVE! PEACE AND LOVE!” to the delight of all, and Enid hugged the closest one and then bothered it – “Bother! Bother! Bother!” – while it tried to throw her off.



“Jellybaby?” I asked, holding up my scarf and the bag. It took some thought, but I managed to place a jellybaby in the Dalek’s plunger. There was a moment of confused reality as a hand snaked out from under the head and grabbed it.

“JELLYBABIES ARE GOOD!”

“Wow,” said Colleen at that point. “We’re standing here talking to a Dalek. No offence,” she added to the Dalek.

“WHAT DID YOU SAY?!”

Colleen took a careful step back. “Nothing, nothing…”

“SPEAK! SPEAK! SPEAK!”

It lunged, and in a chorus of girlie shrieks, we all leapt back and ran. It was the best thing ever, as I said – and each Dalek had a rosette saying either “Vote Dalek!” or “Celebrity Wrestling is crap! Watch Doctor Who at 7pm!”

So we ran off, giggling, and fetched up in front of Costa for the umpteenth time that day, although this time for a specific purpose. We sent Enid and Hannah off normal-person-shopping, and Colleen, Am-Chau and I made preparations for the next stage (Clare had plead tiredness earlier, and went back to get some sleep. A good idea.). At one thirty, we were due to have our First Ever new_who Meet-up.

The difficulty was in how we could be identified. Colleen forgot her Dalek Virgin badge (I didn’t-



-and had therefore bought a hundred and fifty sticky labels, on which she put “Dalek Virgin”, and I put “new_who” on a big piece of paper, held up my scarf and the three of us stood there trying to look as mod-ish as possible.

And it worked. A girl smiled at me, and I wondered if she was just being friendly, or alternatively trying not to laugh hysterically at the three geeks, but she came across and began, “Are you…”

“Yes,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Sarah.”

It was sarah531, she who makes the pretty icons, and two minions (named Emma and Joanne). We retreated into the coffee-shop to compare notes, take pictures and be fannish:



And there was Squee; and lo, it was Good – and after that we went to visit the dealers. We didn’t have as many Quests (or Missions) this time – the only one of any note was mine. I wanted to find the Doctor Who episode City of Death, as it seems to be horribly difficult to get hold of, and we found it! I bought it happily, and various people bought other things. It was fun.

Our old friend Claire-the-dealer wasn’t there this time – according to her husband, she was in Denver – which was a tad disappointing. I mostly bought books this time – one dealer was selling off Doctor Who paperbacks at three quid each, so I got two of those and also an absolutely adorable kids’ book, first published in 1979, entitled The Adventures of K9 and other Mechanical Creatures. It has a guide to making your own K9. I was charmed.

At length, Colleen, Am-Chau and I went outside, away from the crush, and sat on the grass to relax for a while and eat Jaffa cakes. We chatted, and I went off into hysterics after accidentally using the yellow icing tube to make a hot cross Jaffa cake, and at length the conversation turned to the Dance of Backstory. It is, as Colleen explained, what you do when you’re watching Doctor Who and any reference is made to Gallifrey and the Time War.

First, one finger pointed at the screen (you have to imagine the caffienated beverages and coffee tables):

“Ah, backstory!”



Then lift the right leg off the coffee table:



No, the wrong leg:



And shake it all about:



After scaring the local population, we went back to sitting on the grass, where we were later joined by Hannah and Enid, back from their normal-people shopping. They’d bought bras and porn. The book, charitably called “erotica”, is probably the worst thing ever committed to paper, but more on that later.

Am-Chau bid us all goodbye at about five-ish, but before that, we were stopped by a couple of girls holding shopping bags. They wanted to know we were dressed funny. As I said, we might not have been in costume but it didn’t meant we weren’t wearing fannish stuff – I had the scarf, Am-Chau had a witch’s hat, Colleen had her “geek” t-shirt and Enid was wearing a Potter Puppet Pals top.

We had to explain it was a convention, and we’d come from Liverpool, and blah, and blah, and then they asked how old we were.

“Eighteen,” Colleen said, “but we’re not your average eighteen-year-olds.”

“We’ve been doing this since we were much younger,” I said, realising it was true; they left us looking bemused at the scary nerd people, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt prouder to be who I am.

So we bid goodbye to Am-Chau, said hello and goodbye to mettanna (I wish I’d had more than one conversation with her, as the only one I did have involved catalase) and headed back to the hotel to rest for a while.

[And make notes:



We were originally going to eat out at the Harvester like last time, but the rush of people going after seven forty-five meant we’d have no chance of getting a table, so we ordered pizza instead.

Always do what a Dalek tells you to do. We watched the end of Strictly Dance Fever on BBC1, and then it was tea-time and time for Doctor Who. It was episode number six, Dalek, and it begins with as the Doctor and Rose arrive in a bunker in Salt Lake City, Utah, only to be swiftly captured. They are in a museum of alien artefacts, with only one living artefact – the Dalek. Stuff I liked:

-The bit at the beginning where they walk through the museum and see a Cyberman’s head in a glass case. The Doctor says, “I feel old,” and that was the first indicator of how emotionally multi-layered this was going to be.

-The Dalek sees the Doctor and starts to shriek, “EXTERMINATE!” So good. And Rose isn’t there to see the Doctor come slowly, hysterically unglued; he’s frightened and ruthless and generally fraught by turns, and ohmy, so much backstory. I loved it.

-The sympathy we feel for the Dalek. It’s alone, the last of its kind, and when it dipped its plunger and whispered, “I AM… ALONE.”, we all started making quiet despairing noises.

“We’ll look after you,” I said into a pillow.

“Give you a planet of your own,” Clare added.

“With palm trees and beans on toast and strawberry jam,” I continued, getting emotional alongside everyone else.

-The moment where the Dalek reaches the stairs, and then elevates. Scary stuff.

-“You would have made a good Dalek.” The Doctor’s sheer horror brought this down to the level of seriously dark, along with him saying he survived the Time War, but “not by choice.” Eeek.

-More with the dark – Rose is still inside with the Dalek, and the Doctor makes the decision to trap her in there with it.

-The Dalek downloads the entire internet! Presumably it learns a lot about porn and nothing else; I thought it was amusing that the last Dalek episodes were made before the internet really existed.

-Both the Doctor and the Dalek are tortured and unspeakably lonely – the horrible parallels between them made this whole episode deeper, for lack of a better word. Good stuff.

The one thing I didn’t like was the inclusion of annoying English guy as a new companion. Not cool. Other than that, I loved every single minute of it, and plan to watch it again later this week.

Afterwards, Colleen made a lot of badges:



And edited mine:



-while I called Am-Chau and squeed a lot while Colleen yelled, “Gallifrey go BOOM!”

We also did the Dance of Backstory, which we’d been too gripped to do while the show was on.

At which point Machiavelli Simon (si_moon) arrived. He is a friend of Enid’s, who was there for the Sunday, with nowhere to stay except our floor. He fitted in instantly, drinking a bit to get into the spirit of the party, and even getting into the fannish aspect. We all concurred that the moment he really fitted in was when we were discussing age-gaps in het pairings. “You can either have little gaps,” I said, “or really big massive huge gaps, like the Doctor and Rose, which is…”

“881 years,” said Simon obligingly.

“Thanks, and yeah, not Buffy and Angel, which was what, two hundred and twenty years…”

“Ah,” Simon said, “but Angel was in hell for hundreds of years. You’ve just given the wrong figure.”

He silenced me. I bow before him. I also bow before him because he later gave us a rendition of Tom Lehrer’s Elements song, which tells us something about what sort of party it was. We played I Never Did again, and drank and giggled and sang and were generally as indiscreet as possible. At one point, we started to take it in turns to read out from the “erotica” Enid had bought that day. Words cannot describe how awful it was, filled with heaving bosoms and spanked bottoms and goats. Yes, goats. Dreadful.

This is Simon. He does not like to have his photo taken:



Before going to bed, I had a look through my jeans and found the remains of Am-Chau’s peanuts. Amid anguished wails of “I have to wash out my pockets again!”, we…

…fade out.

Sunday - Gallifrey go BOOM!

Getting up the next morning was a struggle. It was grey and dark again, with even more people fighting to use the bathroom (this time I had a toothbrush; Hannah bought me one because I am hopeless) and we had to clean up the debris from the night before and all the crap we’d acquired had to be stashed and tidied away. As well as that, we didn’t all fit into Ron, so Enid and Simon went to grab a taxi while the rest of us got vaguely lost on the way to the place.

They didn't open up until nine, of course, but as veterans of this particular convention, Clare, Colleen and I knew to go back to Costa’s outside entrance, aware that the inside entrance opens before the main doors. We clawed at the glass zombie style until they let us in, at which point we ran through the main hall grabbing tickets. Colleen’s sister and mum, Hannah’s friend Sara, and Simon all wanted to see James Marsters (Spike, in case anyone doesn’t know). He was the most popular guest, and despite being there at the crack of dawn, the tickets we got were in the four hundreds (we were later told that those little tickets were like gold dust, as they stopped handing them out not long after). We also got tickets for Anthony Head, the Red Dwarf guests, and Sean Astin, and after about half an hour of dashing around like idiots, retreated to Costa, this time to actually sit there and have coffee and frescattos. We were outside in the sunshine, and I was enjoying myself thoroughly. A woman in a wheelchair approached the next table while I was sitting there, and she had puppet!Angel in her lap. I bounced, started babbling and finally asked her if I could borrow him to take pictures of. So adorable. Much love.

At which point I got bored and took a picture of myself, which came out unexpectedly well:



On the way out of the coffeeshop, Colleen nudged me. There was a man in the queue with a TARDIS patch on the back of his jacket. “Old school fan?” she said. I nodded, and we bounded up to him.

“You’re a fan,” she announced peremptorily. “Are all Gallifreyans Time Lords?”

“No…” he said slowly.

“And are all Time Lords Gallifreyan?” I demanded.

He blinked. “Yes.”

“Thank you very much!”

And we bounded off again to join the others. The first guests we wanted to see were the Doctor Who ones, the first one of which was Lalla Ward. I’m sure only Colleen and I had any idea who she was because we were watching the old episodes, but we went to see her and she was lovely. There was no-one very much waiting, so we stayed and chatted for ages. She seemed surprised that we were so young. “You weren’t born, surely?” she asked.

“We were two in 1989,” I said, “but we both watch the episodes in the early morning.”

“And it doesn’t look dated to you?”

“We’re generally hungover and don’t notice,” I explained. She laughed, let us take pictures and was generally very very nice to us:



Then Colleen wanted to see Noël Clark, who plays Mickey in the new series, and we were standing in the queue when a man came up to us and said solemnly, “I am kowarth.”

“Oh,” said Colleen and I together.

He knew it was us from the badges, which proves they were useful, and he turned out to be the old-schooliest of old-school fans, and good company. He stuck around until we moved off the Whoniverse and went to see Anthony Stewart Head. Which was too much fun. He was such a popular guest that there wasn’t enough time to personalise autographs, but we went and basically grinned maniacally at him. Hannah particularly was beyond squee-ish, especially when we discovered we’d got the following pic:



The Red Dwarf guests were even more of an experience. Danny John-Jules (the Cat!) had a bit of paper in front of him saying “Ask Craig” and Craig Charles had one saying “Ask Danny!” and they were both so much fun to talk to. Colleen wanted to know if Craig had ever drunk in the Plough pub in Ormskirk (apparently it is a possibility) and teased Hannah about the spelling of her name (two Hs!) and finally, autographed one of the pics with “Awooga!” I was later reminded that this is the noise Holly makes when the alarms stop working. “The alarms are down too. Awooga! Awooga!” It’s in the same vein as “Emergency! Everybody, there’s an emergency going on!”

Craig Charles also wanted to know what the stickers meant. We ended up explaining the Colleen Show to him, which he thought was hilarious. We were all very much of the squee when we went off to lunch. We met the Daleks again, and told them they should have palm trees and strawberry jam (“BUGGER OFF!”) and then, while we were hugging another one of them, it said, “I THINK I SAW A MOVIE LIKE THIS ONCE...” to shrieks from all.

At any rate, the newbies and Simon went to lunch (we’d also seen James Marsters by then, which despite the length of the queue was not the best experience ever) and the rest of us went to the second new_who meet up. sarah531 was there, with her friends, and so was kowarth, and I’ve no idea what we talked about for an hour but it was thoroughly fun. I seem to remember threatening to slash Four and Nine, to which Colleen said, "It's masturbation, only more complicated!" We drew more badges, and kowarth claims he is not an artist but drew this:



-apparently without noticing while we were talking. I was very much impressed.

By the time our own companions returned (with more porn!), it was the beginning of the end. Because we were driving back, we had to get moving – Enid took Simon to the station while Hannah bought a poster she wanted, and then we traipsed out into the car park to sit in Ron and wait for Enid. On the way out, Colleen was looking for something to use up the last shot on her film with – as she snapped the TARDIS, a Dalek and a man dressed as the Master rolled into shot and pointed his gun at her. A good finish.

We got this last picture, with Ron, before leaving:



The journey was long, peaceful and quiet. Clare drove, Colleen navigated, Hannah and Enid slept; I was in the middle, reading one of the Doctor Who novels I’d bought and chuckling occasionally, and we were listening to Placebo. The sun was out, bright and beautiful, and we were making good time.

In Wallasey, we dropped Hannah off, making sure she had her autographs from Colleen’s Folder o’Doom (“Gallifrey go BOOM,” I added helpfully), and got lost in Crosby of all places. Once Enid had gone, it was back to Clare, Colleen and me, and just on the way into Formby, Placebo’s The Bitter End came on.

“It’s all right when Placebo do it,” said Colleen suddenly. If you’ve never seen it, the video for The Bitter End features the band playing in, yes, the dish of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. “It’s all right for a band, but saving the universe, oh, no.”

“It’s the damage they’d do to the dish,” said Clare thoughtfully.

“Oh, he wasn’t in the dish. He was on the gantry below,” I said.

“He wasn’t in the dish? That’s not so bad.”

“It’s okay if he wasn’t in the dish?” I asked.

“What?” Colleen demanded. “We’ve been having this argument the whole weekend for no reason at all?”

I laughed. “Gallifrey go BOOM!”

“Boom,” she agreed. I got out and started to get my stuff out the car, got my autographs from the Folder o’Doom, and trudged inside. Where my parents were hopping a bit because of how late we’d got. They did ask how it went.

“Boom,” I said. “It was fab.”

And it was.

Edited to add: "Gallifrey go BOOM and Gallifrey should stay gone BOOM but if a Dalek slipped through when Gallifrey went BOOM then maybe there are some survivors even though Gallifrey go BOOM because then the Doctor will have fellow Gallifreyans and Gallifrey still stays BOOM!" - hathy_col, quoting taraljc.

Edited again: I may as well reproduce Colleen's footnotes here, as they are very useful regarding the con, the fandom and the Colleen Show in general:

the TARDIS: The TARDIS is a spaceship. It travels through space and time and its acronym is for Time And Relative Distance In Space. It is disguised as a blue box - to be precise, a 1950s style police call box. They don't exist in Britain anymore, but remember that this fandom has been going since 196something. Oh, the lead actor 'regenerates' every time the Doctor dies - we're on the ninth Doctor now (if you take it strictly from the Beeb shows) if you were wondering how it's lasted that long.

By the way, the TARDIS looks like the size of a garden shed on the outside. On the inside, it's massive.

Daleks: A Dalek is arguably the most memorable bad guy from Doctor Who, more recogniseable than the Doctor himself and a big British tradition. They even had two seperate films from the Beeb - Doctor Who And The Daleks and Genesis Of The Daleks. They look like pepper pots with plungers attached and were never scary until you see an episode with them in. They are robots, basically, and speak in weird robotic voices.

Jellybabies: The fourth Doctor - mine and Iona's second favourite Doctor - was obsessed with jelly babies. See the icon.

Dalek Virginity: the state of being when one has never seen an episode with a Dalek in it.

Jaffa: Jaffas are the minions of the Goa'uld in my First Ever Fandom - Stargate SG-1. Jaffa Cakes are an amazingly British thing - basically, these things with a cake base, orange topping and plain chocolate over them all. They are TOO NICE.

the Dance of Backstory: "Numfar! Do the Dance of Joy!" It's an Angel reference - it's basically a dance from a dimension with no music. It's an appalling dance.

End footnotes. I am a geek.

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[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, we did, we did. :)