I’ve spent the last few days in a field down in Woolpit, in Surrey. Singing, drinking, joking, entertaining, being entertained, joked at, drank at and sung at. It’s been wonderful, and I can’t wait until the con next year for more of similer.
It started on Friday, when I wandered out of work to go straight to the field and accidentally met LoneCat at the station. The plan was for me to go there by train, whilst LC took the train to Bedford, got the car from her parents, filled it with tent and camping stuff, and wandered down to Woolpit. Since we ran into each other by chance at Kings Cross, we both wandered to Bedford and down by car when we entered the field. When we got there we were hailed by a group of wandering minstrals (eric jarvis, Adrian Ogden & CraigD) who mentioned that the Jam session we’d all organised to happen was due to start at sevenish. At 7ish it started, at 11ish it ended. The description of the Jam I’ll leave to others, for my part I’ll say that I totally screwed up ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ by the simple method of drinking half a glass of Hamster’s home-brew before going on stage which sent my voice all over the shop. There was some fantastic singing, some not quite so fantastic singing, and some plans for the next one.
A note here on clothing. I have a tradition of wearing very loud clothes at CCDE. This year I kinda excelled myself, though it’s the last time I’ll be doing so to any degree more than normal. It was nice while it lasted, though 🙂
Saturday dawned nice and bright and early, as it does when you are camping. And at some time similer to “dearOmIt’sEarly” I was standing around drinking tea and waiting for the van of breakfast to swing open it’s shutters. Eventually it did, and Satuday came – for me – as a day of sitting around in circles in the sunshine taking salt and speaking of affairs. In the evening there was the Maskerdade which was won by an unconsidered trifle, but should have been won by LoneCat and Añejo as Nac Mac Feegles. Later there was Martin being tied up whilst everyone else had a barbeque. Yay.
Sunday was the Day of Games. For most, it was also the Day Of Going Home, but there was still lots of Games as well. Since ppint and his clones were selling games, we combined the entire series of Munchkin card-sets into one huge “Ultra-Munchkin” set which snow won after about three hours of play, after which I was exceedingly sunburnt. Also happening was ccooke’s game of “”Frag””:http://www.sjgames.com/frag which is what happens if you turn Quake/Doom/Unreal into a board game. It’s fun, you should buy it.
Monday came, goodbyes were said, tents were struck and we left at 1-ish to go from Woolpit Bedford Kings Cross Paddington Reading. This took 9 hours.
Then we slept. We were very tired.
Photos will be coming soon, but I left my camera by Liz’s tent, and so won’t get mine until it gets back to me.