Until the Dragon Comes

I promised a report, and here it is. :-)



When I heard that Worldcon was coming to London, I really wanted to take the opportunity to attend when it was on my door-step, but I wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it. Thanks to the offer of a floor to crash on at Umbrella Man's nearby flat, and being very firm with my manager, I managed to overcome most of the obstacles, and on the Wednesday evening after work I set off for the big city. :-)

Cat was also staying, and after an evening of eating pizza, taking apart computers and playing Martian Fluxx, we set our alarms to get there in good time for Registration on Thursday morning.

If I tried to describe all the panels I attended, and people that I met, I know I'd miss people and bore you all silly, so I'll be content to say that I had a wonderful weekend, enjoyed Doctor Who and book panels, the vid shows run by such_heights and eldritchhobbit's wonderful talk on Sherlock Holmes and sci-fi.

(If you'd like a look at the Excel Centre and some of the exhibit area and fan village, I hope she won't mind me linking to her pictures, which are far better than anything I took.)

I did take a few pictures of things I fell in love with in the exhibit hall...

( Angst-Lesspork )

( Lego Millenium Falcon )

( The Tiki Dalek )

( Other things I really enjoyed included... )

All in all, an experience I'll always remember, and while there's no way my budget can stretch to cross-Atlantic flights, if the Dublin bid for 2019 succeeds, I'll certainly do my best to be there.

On Thursday we decided to take advantage of the good weather and visit these famous gardens. (One of those places you always intend to visit, one of these days, and don't always get round to.) If you haven't come across it before, there's a pretty good Wikipedia entry. It's one of the first big English style landscape gardens, with lawns, woods and random structures to make it more visually interesting.

ETA I was also pointed by a friend to the DNB article on Viscount Cobham, the originator of the gardens.

Admiring the Pebble Arch



( More photos under here )

For the completeists among you, I made an album with all the pictures I took on Flickr. :-)

As I have another week off, to use time up before the end of the holiday year, I was free to visit gayalondiel and her knitting/sewing group at the Fair Trade shop here in Winchcombe. :-) (If you've never had TraidCraft biscuits, you are missing out.)

It was lovely to see her, and I actually got some cross-stitch done, something that's more or less fallen by the wayside since we moved here. You never know, one day I might start the steam engine I had got all the materials for before we moved. The internet has a lot to answer for...

Still, having finally succumbed and bought a Blu-Ray player (and the latest Marvel films), I should have more excuse to get away from the computer screen.

Was last weekend, and I had a good time, as I usually do. :-)

It was lovely to see many friends again, in such beautiful surroundings - though odd not to have to be much involved in the organisation, after 4 years. It all went very well, and Toryboy did an excellent job at Enyalië, I thought. (As I said to several people at the event, I think it is in many ways the most difficult of the Chairman's tasks. It's so public, and so important, but it's also very personal - it's all down to you to decide what to say and how to say it.)

The LotR and Hobbit Lego saw some active use in Ops/Hospitality - one favourite adaptation was:
( The Web Enabled Troll )

Highlights of the weekend for me included Jemima Catlin, the artist who has created the new illustrated edition of the Hobbit, released a few days before the weekend. It was very interesting to hear her talk about her inspirations and I found I got so much more out of the illustrations through being encouraged to really look at them - they have a lot of small details that are easy to miss at first glance.
(  Banner made by another attendee )

One point that I would probably have missed, for example, the way she used the famous photo of the Professor leaning back against a tree as inspiration for Bilbo's pose on the cover, as you can see in the banner.

Another thing that I was very much looking forward to was not strictly an Oxonmoot event, though we did get a special viewing, but was the Magical Worlds exhibition at the Bodleian. It's a free exhibition, on until the 27th October, and I highly recommend it to any one who loves children's fantastic writing. It contains everything from illuminated medieval manuscripts to the 6 circles, from Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series (Wood, Bronze, Iron, Water, Fire, Stone). It also has several of Tolkien's original illustrations for the Hobbit, the first page of the handwritten manuscript for "The Fall of Arthur" and also manuscripts from authors such as Alan Garner and Philip Pullman. It was a lovely way to spend a hour in the company of other fans. :-)

Next year it's going to be an extended event, starting on the Thursday - definitely looking forward to it.

The weekend was the first Steam Gala for my local railway for a number of years, and they decided to push the boat out with a major event, including 3 visiting locos (925, 80072, 8572) as well as the 4 that normally work the line.

I was working Friday and Saturday, unfortunately, but was able to volunteer to help in the cafe yesterday (very busy, lot of fun) and to go as a visitor today. My shiny new phone came in very handy, and I took quite a few pictures, some of which you can see on Flickr here.

Highlights of the day including travelling from Toddington down to Cheltenham in the brake van on the back of the freight train they had running all weekend, as well as 3 passenger trains.

( Brake van )

As you can probably tell from the picture, it was a draughty trip but the view all round was wonderful. We had the chance to chat with the guard, and a couple of experienced volunteers, and hear a lot more about the history and running of the railway. The most exciting bit was probably going through the tunnel - it's nearly 700 ft long and curves through the hill, so the middle, in the unlit brake van, was pitch black. The last time I was anywhere that dark, it was down a coal mine.

Coming back to Toddington in a slighter better lit vehicle, I looked around the site and had a ride on the narrow-gauge railway. Only about half a mile, but their workshop was open and interesting to look around - though I was rather amused by this sign on the way out.

( What did they think we were going to get up to in there? )

I also climbed up onto the foot plate of this monster...

( Merchant Navy Class 35006 )

She's been under restoration at Toddington since 1983 (she'd been heavily cannibalised for parts for other engines), and they're hoping that she'll be ready to steam later this year.

Finally, back in Cheltenham the Racecourse was being used for a Bank Holiday weekend fun event, and this was the sight we were greeted with, as we came into the station. :-)

Yesterday was my last Tolkien Society committee meeting (at least for the foreseeable future).

I'm still in post, until midnight on the 20th April, after the AGM, and there's still quite a lot to do between now and then. On the other hand, going to Birmingham (and before that Oxford) every couple of months for a meeting and a meal afterwards has been part of my life for the last 15 years. It's going to be strange not to be doing that.

I decided I wanted to make a little bit of an occasion of it, and arranged for us to go to a slightly fancier restaurant than usual - Asha's, which is a very nice Indian restaurant, only minutes from where we usually meet. We had an excellent meal, which was a nice end to an era.


Another interesting part of the day was an organised fund-raising event for Action for Children - the Big Egg Hunt. I spotted the first of the Eggs as I was walking along New St and there were a mass of them outside the Council House in Victoria Square

( Some of the Eggs )

I didn't have time to take part, but there were quite a few happy children defying the bitterly cold weather to run around looking for the Eggs, and I really enjoyed seeing such an interesting and unusual way of raising money.

It was quiet yesterday and I wasn't down to work all day anyway, so my manager sent me home an hour or so early. It was such a nice day (not hot, but sunny and warm enough) it seemed to shame to head straight home to glue myself to the internet.

So I decided to have a coffee in my favourite local tea shop, the one that sells Winstones Ice Cream. :-) It's on Hailes St - I think - one of the interesting quirks of Winchcombe is that the main street has 3 or 4 different names as it goes through the (fairly small) town. Then I took the route back home through the houses and along the side of the river, which was a very pleasant walk.

Encouraged by the continued good weather, and the great news that our local heritage railway has made the money it needs to complete repairs to the landslip on the line that happened a couple of years ago, I decided to pay them a visit and enjoy the countryside from a steam train.

Oh and take pictures of the engine for my Tumblr blog. :-)

( One picture under here )

It's great to see them doing well, and I'm looking forward hopefully to the day when I might be able to get the train to Broadway, or even link up with the main line at Honeybourne.

I'd originally agreed to go for a walk with a friend on Bank Holiday Monday, but the weather was so miserable that we decided to postpone. Today, it was much nicer, so we decided to set out.

We were walking to Hailes Abbey along the Cotswold Way, in theory about 2.5 miles each way, up along the hill. Of course, things are never that simple, and about half way there we realised that not only were there cows in the field the path was going through, but a bull as well, and it had decided that across the path was exactly where it wanted to stand. My friend was rather nervous to start with, and I decided that discretion was probably the better part of valour, so we decided to walk through the ploughed field next door. Once we'd retrieved my shoe from the mud it got stuck in (I really must buy some walking boots if I'm going to make a habit of this kind of lark) we didn't get on too badly and fairly quickly reached our destination.

There's a small church at Hailes, with medieval wall paintings, including some very interesting mythological creatures (I particularly like the elephant-headed dragon), as well as the ruins of the abbey, and we stopped there for a while, before going on to the cafe at the Hayles Apple Farm for some excellent home-made cake and tea.

Then it was time for the return journey, and we decided to try and avoid the field with the cows in altogether. This made for an interesting series of detours up and down the slope at the side of crop fields and/or in the tractor tracks. (We were pretty careful not to trample the crops, but quite frankly, the farmer should have kept his bull out of the field with the footpath in.) At one point we wondered if we'd met a road, to find it was the railway track - interesting to see, but an obstacle to progress. Finally we found our way to a gate to the field we needed, only to find it locked and not conducive to being climbed over. (Wire mesh at the bottom.) Fortunately, I'd noticed that a hundred yards or so along the hedge was replaced by a low piece of barbed wire, which we could climb over and we were back on the path.

Finally I was able to show my friend a short-cut up through the houses to our road, and it was home for a long soak in the bath and hope that I'm not too ridiculously stiff in the morning. I think I'd forgotten how long it's been since I was regularly walking a mile to work every day - nearly 6 months - and that was on pavements. Still, I had a good time, and will probably do it again, once my legs will move properly. ;-)

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...

( Read more... )

We had a good day on the Severn Valley Railway, but I was a little disappointed that I hadn't managed to get to the GWSR's gala in celebration of 175 of the Great Western Railway.

So it was rather exciting on the way home down the motorway, when we realised that the trailer we were passing in the slow lane was carrying a steam engine. And not just any steam engine but the City of Truro originally built in 1903 and with a strong claim to be the first steam train to do over 100mph.

( Picture under the cut )

It was obviously leaving Toddington for another railway, to take part in their GWR 175 celebrations.

I'm looking forward to visiting the GWSR again, probably after they've had the chance to restore services to Cheltenham after a landslide on the line, but in the meantime they've put up a video to give a sample of the event.

( YouTube video here )