The first thing I forgot from Part I was the quiz in the pub on the Thursday night. There was this quiz, you see, and our team (myself,
Another amusing coincidence came in the opening ceremony - a tallish guy sat down next to me, and I heard voices somewhere calling out "Cookie". Since that had been my nickname all through primary and high schools, I looked around, but soon realised that they were aiming for the guy next to me - whose surname is "Cooke", of course. I said hello and pointed to my name badge and explained my nickname, and I think we were both suitably amused.
Continuing from Part I, after the Maskerade photo session,
Onwards, to what we got up to on Sunday. We didn't get up early enough for the Church of Om - maybe next time. Did manage breakfast (just; surfacing before 10am is hard work, you know), then went to The Dysk (main room) and offered to help out with Tech Stuff. They didn't need us right away, so we sat in on a talk by Jack Cohen, "The Biology of Discworld" (which was, of course, mostly about Roundworld biology by comparison). I quite liked his "four 'f's", features which have evolved separately a number of times, and which we think would be reasonably likely to evolve elsewhere, given half a chance - fur, feathers, photosynthesis, and ... sex. After that, we did get to play with tech - Mandy(tech-winolj) and I fiddled with the lighting set-up for the two "game show" sessions coming up in the room, while the other techs worked out some problems they were having with the cameras. The lighting arrangement was quite simple, but it was rather fun to be in control of it all. I can definitely see myself doing more of that sort of thing.
After that, time passed again, and I'm not quite sure what we did with it. Probably another round of lunch, dealers room, and random wandering around. There was a juggling session, where I demonstrated juggling up to 5 balls, and giving advice on doing 4 and various tricks to people there, and taught someone simple passing.
After that, I went to part of the charity auction, watching surprisingly large amounts of money being spent - there are often similar auctions at Australian conventions, but they generally don't involve such enthusiastic bidding. I'm not sure if it's because the items for auction were more valuable (on eBay ?), or DW fans have more money to throw around, or just general enthusiasm. Fortunately, I only had £10 in my wallet at the time, so I was out of the bidding for just about everything in the first few seconds. (Later, it was announced that the auction had raised over £11,000 or so (!), all going to the Orangutan Foundation).
After the auction ran somewhat over time,
Monday was fairly quite, we saw a couple of panels, and "The Reduced Discworld" - a performance of all of the major Discworld novels so far, in under an hour (very amusing !). After this, there was some idle wandering around, a game of Go with Cookie while waiting for the closing ceremony (unfortunately it was a bit rushed, and we didn't get time to score it properly; I think he was winning by 10-20 points, though). Finally, it was time for the closing ceremony, and many thanks were read out, the committee all went up on stage (there were lots of them), Terry gave a closing speech, and finally, the Con was officially over.
The Tech crew called for volunteers to help take everything down, so
Again, there were quite a few Con-goers staying at the hotel that night, so again a buffet dinner was put on for us. This one had chocolate cake for dessert, so all was well :-)
And finally, there was the Dead Monkey Party (at Aussie cons the after-con party would be called a "dead dog party"; wonder if this is a Discworld thing or a UK thing ?), where people gathered in The Hub and talked.
Whew. All that remained was Tuesday, and driving back up to Glasgow. We detoured via Leicester, and looked for Leicester castle, which turned out to be more like small remaining bits of castle incorporated into later buildings and walls and things. Still interesting, though. After that, it was just driving, driving, and some more driving, with about equal amounts of rain and sunshine, and then some quick grocery shopping and home again.
(for the terminally curious, we ate very healthily while driving (not!) - two tins of Pringles, 200g of other crisps, around 300g of chocolate, two bottles of Coke, ice-cream ... ahhh, road trip food).
So, I've now run around finding Discworld people on LJ and popped into alt.fan.pratchett. Let's hope I can catch up with some of them before 2006 (August 2006, and see the

Meanwhile, we've signed up for Redemption 05 (a Blake's 7, Babylon 5, and "other" con in Feburary or so), and the 2005 WorldCon (held in Glasgow, of course), and we're wondering whether we want to go to Novacon.
Now we just have to plan our fencing competition calendar, and we're all set.
(Edit: It was Leicester we stopped in, not Leeds)