Excellent idea.
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I find that gin is usually a good idea
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Urrrrk!, Twellsy. That would have needed enormous squoodles of Gin.
I did once find a teeny infant slug on my upper lip after picking up the princess cat and wiffling her fur on her return from Outside…
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And if I had been told that had been done I might even have used it. As it was, I wasn’t and didn’t. I was offered the Archers, and politely declined.
This means you get the whole lot at once, starting with having been put into a room with a shower and not a bath by the hotel. (We will leave the Hurtling to the imagination; it was, erm. Yes. I only broke the speed-limit once…) On the first morning therefore I came down having had a shower, and the pleasant man at reception asked me whether I was enjoying my stay, and I told him that the room was grand and the bed comfortable but that I loathe a shower with a deep and terrible loathing the depth of which he could never hope to comprehend, him having only an ordinary human understanding, because the depth of it was beyond the human ken. He didn’t even step back, just said he’d see what he could do, and by the time I’d had my breakfast (with porridge, and then bacon, and fried potato, and fried tomato, and mushrooms, and orange juice, and milk, and iced water, and hot chocolate, and slices of ham and cheese, and a croissant – I wasn’t expecting to eat again that day) he’d found me a room with a bath and arranged to swap us to it, “just pack your things and we’ll move them for you”. I like Ireland.
Then we went to the Convention Centre. It was a ten minute walk for a normal person, twenty for someone with plantar fasciitis, but since there was nowhere to park when we got there taking the car was Right Out: she stayed in the basement under the hotel the whole time we were there. When we arrived and registered they were just opening the doors of the dealers’ room, so in we went and found a table that wasn’t in use for me to sit at and curse the luck. Then we found Finns, and friends, and eventually a bar named for one of my friends who died last month, and red beer, and I started to feel more human.
I do like it when I am walking slowly along and get bounced up to by a Guest of Honour who greets me by name while I am still working out who he is, says how great it is to see me and then vanishes to get a drink before a panel, leaving the nearby young things about me realising that I am not just a stupid old fart to be patronised. It helps my morale.
That evening some friends were having a party, so we didn’t go out to eat and I was right about the breakfast. My foot was really remarkably painful by the time we got back to the hotel, and I was crying with weariness, so I think a walk to a caff would have finished me off.
The next day was more of the same, but less footsore; I’d been given a new exercise the night before by a fellow-sufferer or rather someone who’d had pf and recovered, which actually worked. Hurrah! So I wandered about talking with friends and looking at things and talking some more, and went to a panel with a friend on it and afterwards out with her for a meal which was, well. We sat down outside in the sun and ordered: two starters, two mains because I’d decided that I really wasn’t all that hungry and the friend had decided that neither was she. After about half an hour my starter arrived, so I assumed That Bird’s would be along in a minute and ate it. Half an hour later nothing more had happened except that the sun had gone in and our friend had put on her coat, and I went in and suggested politely that we might starve to death outside or start to eat the other guests, and how about some food? There was what I suspect may have been a startled pause, and then That Bird’s and our friend’s main courses arrived very swiftly (like after ten minutes or so), hers too big for her to manage so I helped her finish it (having by then become vaguely hungry again); we decided two hours after arrival that a dessert would be pushing our luck and asked for the bill. They brought it; and it was for someone completely different, food we’d never ordered nor seen, and we think (since it was clearly for six) that it may have been the bill for the table next to us, who had arrived before us and left half-fed to get to a programme item while we were waiting for the starters. Still, the staff did believe our outraged comments and refusal to acknowledge that bill, and brought another, which we paid after requiring them to remove the starter we’d not had nor seen. For some reason we didn’t feel inclined to leave a tip. The sad thing was that the food when it finally appeared had been wonderful; if we could have tipped the food and not the waiting staff we would have.
I think the Finn worldcon must have made a good profit for them to take over that bar for that evening. We arrived back in time to see it and to thank them for the worldcon and the beer, anyway. And so to bed, slowly, taking a long time over the walk back to the hotel.
The next day is a bit of a blur, though we re-encountered the same friend at the end of it and went with her to the closest restaurant we could find – a boat moored on the Liffey perhaps a hundred yards from the convention. That Bird has posted a link so I shan’t expatiate, just say that in contrast to the place the night before the service was superb, and the food in a different style was just as wonderful, and the mushroom soup was better than I make myself – and the vanilla ice-cream had the little black dots in it that say “real vanilla went into this”.
It was the next day we heard about the mishap of The Surprising Mrs Shanks; I hope she is now as comfortable as one can be with w broken arm and a bruised face, and doesn’t feel stupid about having fallen.
And that was also the day I spent the afternoon at a friend’s stall selling what is known as phlosque. He is actually a metal-worker, and a good one, so some of his stall has the things he has made, but the rest is there to make it worth his while to pay for the stall and come to the con, and much of it is ghastly. The Phlosque Award was invented at an Eastercon in Jersey in I think 1993, and is given at Easter each year: we had a slightly drunken dinner in a large crowd of miscreants which included an eccentric artist friend who had declared war on “small pink fluffy cuddly dragons with long eyelashes and a mission to save the ecosystem, other pastels are available if you have a strong stomach”, of which there was rather a superabundance in the art-show that year, and also in the dealers’ room. Sparkly resin unicorns with pastel horns and manes and tails also roused his ire, as did winsome child-mermaids… Anyhow; he was calling them “flosk” in a cross way, and we re-spelled them for him between us and suggested that he give an award. I think he made it the following morning, as vulgar and kitsch as he was able to with the materials to hand (and they were many: he raided the costuming workshop); then he went round the convention presenting “Plosque Award” cards to people (ir)responsible for things which he particularly hated, telling them they should come to the Art Show Awards. I don’t think that most of them understood it at all; that year it was being talked about as a new award and exciting. My friend Tony won with a dragon of a cuteness so disgusting that even he was embarrassed by it – and that damn’ dragon sold by dozens after the con to people who wanted it because it was award-winning! Luckily he knew which factory it had come from and was able to fill the orders, raise the price and make a nice little profit.
So now he feels obliged to provide at least some chubby little cherubim in dragon form each con he goes to. I forget how many phlosque awards he has won. Anyhow, there the undeniably phlosque dragons were, and there I was, and a person who looked adult but wasn’t a grown-up inside fell in love with the pink one and the mauve one and her mother wanted to get her both, but there was a problem about shipping them to the States. Argh. We sorted it somehow, and the woman-child stopped not-crying-honest just tears falling down her face, which had nearly broken my heart until we made sure she could have them.
I am glad to say that I cannot find either on the internet, but those dragons came from the same stable as this one I think: Fairy Garden Fun Blue Baby Dragon Miniature Dollhouse Figurine | eBay
and were winsome as all hell get out; about five inches high and certainly a diabetic sin just to look at them in passing. The damn’ things were freakin’ cuddly even in resin. If they’d been cloth I’d have had to borrow a flame-thrower.
Barbancourt is the right rum. Rhum Barbancourt - Wikipedia
The Innocuous Dave introduced the Sudden Daughter to it, and then we had to keep some in the house in case of Sudden Arrivals without driving afterwards.
My reward for the dragons was a finger-mouse. It sits on my little finger and is designed to frighten cats with.
On the last day of the convention, the Monday, I went suddenly mad and spent €280 on a black leather waistcoat with absurd wide shoulder pauldrons or more likely spaulders, and bright red large Celtic knotwork in a simple design up fronts and back on each side. I am not sure what came over me; it is simply a lovely thing, but when I can or shall wear it I have no idea.
And then after the last reading of the convention, though not the closing ceremony, we went out for the meet with Twellies and Ebony Bull and Joe and had A Time. Someone else can write that up; this post is absurdly long already. I shall save yesterday for another one after I have had some food to build myself up with.
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We have a grandmother spider sitting in the sink; she is perhaps two and a half inches long including legs, half an inch in the body. I cannot wash up. Oh dear.
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‘A fearsome-looking beast, half-an-inch across at least’?
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She isn’t that big really, only half an inch along not across.
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…and by heck, it stayed broken all the way to Holyhead, yes?
Brave young feller. Mind you, it being a WorldCon, they probably deploy the reception equivalent of the Marines
I second that Hurrah!
Oh, I do wish I’d been there. Mind you, I’d probably have used me improvised plasma arc on the child-woman too. Which would not have been Kind.
< sigh > Bad Fish. But the waistcoat sounds glorious.
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The finger mouse is gorgeous
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Those who dislike them will prefer not to look at the picture That Bird has just taken. Her legs reach to each side of the glass in which I have captured her ready to fling her out into the garden.
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I like spiders 
They eat flies
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Sp, allegedly and [Trad.] do Old Women.
No, I don’t know why.
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She swallowed a fly…
Wonderful account of your doings and misdoings, Fishers.
{{Splutter}}
I am very glad that Dublin was fun!
That Spider - I looked - is exactly like the almost-dead one I found an hour ago in our shower (lovely, lovely shower) room. It was next to the lav and Mr Bee reckoned it had been squished, prolly by a foot. Oh, well; I still had me boots on.
Soo xx
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Hugs for Gus.
Soo xx
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Now back from the eye clinic
Have a tiny bit less sight than previously
But still just enough to be useful
I think gin might be in order to celebrate this
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Dammit, about the sight getting less.
But if it is still useful, then good.
Vodka for me, not gin…
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It’s a good six years since the field of vision was done so losing a tiny bit in that length of time is nothing to worry about
I did ask about driving and was told not to think of it
As I have useful sight left he is just going to monitor me every six months or so
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And now I think I understand the Dublin City Centre 30kmh speed limit … if you manage to break it, heavenly choirs will burst forth singing hosannas, the smell of rose blossoms will erupt into your car, and you’ll get a Certificate of Achievement, signed personally by the head of the Garda Traffic Corps. And then you get fined 
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There is a little more to tell about the Ireland trip, which having had food and been shopping I am now strong enough to tell.
Yesterday morning we finished our breakfast and even with them bringing the time of our ferry home forward by half an hour or more we still had a couple of hours to waste, so rather than going into the city and hurting my foot again we got into the car and set out towards the Dublin Mountains we could just see between the rain. Whereupon the sun came out and we bowled along in fine weather along roads which were less and less citified, until I saw a nice turning off to the left where the tallest bits of hill were in the distance and we went up it.
It was a dear of a road. Not what I would call the widest or most populated, mind; after a while it had grass up the middle, and once the lorry we met as we were about to turn in had gone past us we saw one van, which came towards us and then pulled into the layby where we had stopped to look at the view at the top of it, and one car which went past us while we were sitting, and two bicycles coming up the hill towards us slowly in the other direction. That was it. It’s the road from Ballinascorney Gap to Kippure Bridge, we think, and the views are astounding; and there is a delight of a small river that trickles over large rocks in one bit, which maybe grows up into a full-blown spate when there has been a bit of real rain to encourage it.
Only then we realised we’d cut it fine for the ferry and had to come away.
Then when we had landed we stopped for fuel and sandwiches in Bangor and decided the hell with the motorways, we were going to go home the pretty way. That meant Snowdon. It was raining fairly hard by the time we left Bangor, so we didn’t expect to stop and be touristy, but I then enjoyed the second wonderful road of the day, winding along between mountains and along a river and past lakes and across bridges. I think it was almost better for not being a fine day; it felt as if those mountains wanted to be seen in rain, with wisps of cloud coming to the edge of a ridge and falling off it into the valley below, and unyielding hard black lumps of rock sticking up, and screes into valleys; not a place for humans so much as a place to tell humans how small they are and how little they matter in the scheme of things.
But there was the matter of the loos. Or rather, that there were none. Oh well, nothing’s perfect.
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