sally_maria | Oxonmoot - a lovely weekend

Oxonmoot is always one of the high-lights of my year - the chance to spend the weekend with so many wonderful people, doing interesting Tolkien-y things.

This year I was determined to have Friday off work, as I didn't last year and it really seemed to cut into the weekend. I packed in the morning, and had a lift, getting there at around 3pm, in time to start getting in the way of the people doing the work of setting up. :-) I did managed to say hello to a fairly large group from Unquendor, the Dutch Tolkien Society, who were going out for tea, as dinner was not until 8pm.

I continued hang about greeting friends and occasionally being useful until 6pm or so, when I retired to the bar with

parrot_knight and DTE Kate. We chatted about this and that, but when I went to buy the next round I met a very nice young man from the Netherlands, who currently works at the EU commission in Brussels. All of us had an interesting discussion on the nature of hung parliaments and coalition governments - apparently neither the Netherlands nor Belgium has had a proper government for months, because of the coalition negotiations. Puts our week or so before Brown's resignation into perspective...

I've recently started going to the Friday night dinners again, and although they aren't the cheapest of meals, it really does make a nice start to the weekend, and a chance to meet and talk to old friends and new faces alike.

Then it was time to head back to the bar, meet more people and retire to

gayalondiel's room to drink wine and hear the tale of

tawnyscrawny.

Saturday morning dawned bright and (too) early, and it was time to head to breakfast, before my first paper of the day,

wellinghall's on Vikings in Greenland and North America - lots of interesting facts that I didn't know.

Then it was time to hare off into Oxford to buy lunch for the picnic. Fortunately Saturday was a lovely sunny day, though still cold out of the sun, and I think the picnic was a very good idea, which I hope will be repeated.

I made it back in time for the auction, in which I saw a lot of ex-TS Library books go to good homes, and also won the item I'd been planning on bidding on - a bespoke corset. :-) I've been thinking about getting one for a while, and it seemed like a opportunity to get one that would work for me, with the money going to a good cause. It'll be after Christmas before I get it, but maybe for next Oxonmoot...

In the afternoon, I finally saw Born of Hope, on the big screen, and despite some technical glitches I really enjoyed it - it's truly impressive what can be done on a small budget with a lot of love and hard work. (Of course, I was rooting for Elgarain/Arathorn - what can I say, brothers in arms shipper all the way. ;-D)

Then it was time to dash off to G&Ds for a quick meal, before getting ready for the party - my costume takes a while to lace me into, and I needed to be there at the beginning to make a couple of presentations.

A fun evening, surrounded by corsets (and the odd emu). :-) Highlights were

gayalondiel's wonderful singing and

crazyscot's spoof weather forecast for Middle-earth. There were some great costumes as well, including

pellegrina's warg and Jeweller's beautiful dress.

As the bar called last orders, I moved on to the Unquendor room party. A couple of the Dutch contingent had been to Oxonmoot before, in 1997, my first year. They'd looked at their photo album of the visit, and found a picture of me - apparently I really hadn't changed very much. :-)

At 2am I decided to head for bed, in the hope of being awake for Enyalie in the morning.

Sunday morning was much greyer, and I was glad of my coat as we stood around waiting for the coaches - the college wanting to kick us out of our rooms by 9.30 was a general stimulus to action.

All too soon it was all over, although some people were sticking around for a meeting, and I headed to G&Ds again with

parrot_knight,

the_marquis,

bouncyelf and the Teen.

Back to college to say goodbye to more people and then out to Pear Tree for my lift home, happy after a good weekend.