Getting old

After a gap of over 5 years, there we were back at The Roundhouse for the second time in a week on 18th October to see Steve Winwood (thanks Harry for the reminder that I'd forgotten to mention him!).




Waiting in the bar for the doors to open (where else would you wait?) I looked over the rest of the audience, and it happened again - just like when we went to see The Blues Band - the rest of the audience seemed SO old! The trouble is, so are we. There I was thinking we were so 'with it' still going to gigs, and the reality is that we're as old as that audience, all of us still following our favourites from the 1970s.



Looking over the standing audience on the ground floor, it looked like a Grecian 2000 salesman's dream!



When we sat down I was really pleased with the positioning:



"Hey John, it's great I can see the whole stage - the pillars are only blocking the view of the keyboards p.. l ..a ..y ..e.. r . . . . . . aah, do you think he'll play the keyboards ALL night?"



The gig? It was good, but for me it was too jazz rock. Way too many jazz-style solos.

Below there might be a short video if I can ever get it to upload. . .

Life at the moment seems to be concentrating on making me feel age. At Novacon this weekend (there will be a separate post on the convention) Doug Bell referred to joining our table in the bar (John, me, Mike & Pat Meara and Graham Charnock) as 'visiting the 70's table' Bad enough if he was referring to us as 70's fandom, but I've just thought he might have been referring to our age! No, surely not.

And then there's John, who should know better, but still let slip that when I collect my next prescription on Tuesday, that will be the last one I have to pay for.

Excuse me while I go off into a corner and cry a little.

Metropolis and coincidences

It's quite 'fun' to be back at work again. Not least it's all change with a new boss, the departure of an old boss and a new location within the building. Which Roman general was it who made the comment about constantly being moved/rearranged? Incisive seems to follow that plan, I've been here since June 2008 and have moved 6 times over 3 floors!

Anyway, it was good to see Julie again. She told me that she'd been to the Prince Charles cinema (just round the corner from our offices at Piccadilly) to see a restored version of Metropolis. Not a science fiction fan, she still thought it was excellent and 'iconic'. This took me by surprise - not that she should like Metropolis, but that she should have seen it so recently. Only the day before John had mentioned that they were showing the film at The Roundhouse with a live orchestra. (Mind you, showing it with a dead orchestra would have been a bit silly.) What a coincidence!

"Do you fancy seeing it again?" "Yes, that would be awesome."

So I bought tickets for the next evening (the last evening) and off we went.

What a performance! John and I reckoned it must have been at least 25 years since we'd seen it, so I had forgotten most of the storyline apart from the obvious clips. I was on the edge of my seat for most of the second half, due in great part to the emotive nature of the live orchestra.

If anyone is reading this, and you get the chance to see it with live orchestra - GO! And the reconstruction with the new bits they found in 16mm in S.America makes the whole film hang together so much better than its disjointed predecessor.

There were only 2 downers

1. They wouldn't let us take our bottle of wine upstairs where we were sitting so had to decant it into large plastic glasses which meant the white wine warmed up very quickly.
2. The seats in the circle at The Roundhouse are INCREDIBLY uncomfortable.

Such is life - we're going there again tonight to see Stevie Winwood, but hopefully we'll be up and dancing so the lack of padding on the seats won't be so much of a feature.

A Brighton Belle Met Skippy

I don't know if I'm really cut out for this constant contact lark - life seems to get in the way of uploading info about our 'doings'. So, over a month ago I left you having just arrived at a disgusting time of the morning after a 27-hour flight, and 36 hours after leaving home. Now I'm trying to remember what on earth we did over that period! I did make notes (well for a couple of days), but as usual they mean very little now.



So, we met lots of old friends, avoided some others, didn't see as much as we would have liked of yet others, and made new friends. Plus, we saw the same and different bits of Australia. Hey presto, that's a 4-week holiday boiled down into a nutshell. What I really want to do is an interactive map - when eventually I can stop working to keep our mortgage in the style to which it has become accustomed, I want to experiment with doing a 'proper' online fanzine. By 'proper' I mean one that actually utilises the power of the web properly. After all, I earn my crust at the moment doing this for training, so it would be fun to play around with doing it for stuff I really enjoy. Hopefully this time will come next summer - it depends on what happens to the stock exchange by next March when I'm 60 and my personal pensions mature. If all goes well, we can use some of the money to pay down the mortgage and hence reduce the horrendous amount we have to pay each month.



Anyway, for now you'll have to put up with words. Pictures will come later and even perhaps some video - when we've sorted out what we actually have.



The bare bones - we started off at the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, Aussiecon 4 where I quite amazingly realised that we had been to more Worldcons in Australia than anywhere else. In fact, we have only been to 2 other world conventions - Seacon 79 where we ran the Fan Room, and Conspiracy (where we wisely were not on the committee), both held in my home town of Brighton, England.



I just love the way in fandom you can meet up with someone after many years and it's like no time has passed (so long as you squint so you can't see the added grey hairs etc). For me the whole aim of convention-going is to meet up with old friends and make new ones, which we did in spades at Aussiecon 4. This was most surprising considering the austere and unfriendly nature of the Convention Centre in which we spent most of our time - to try and find someone was almost impossible because the place was cavernous, and also the convention committee didn't really do the best with the rooms they had to provide a convivial meeting/waiting/chatting area.



I actually made some notes about the first day . . .

A Truly International Technological Affair

I know it's a world convention we're attending and so it is not surprising that it's an international affair, but Thursday was mind-blowing. In the few days before we left the UK, John and Rich Coad from San Francisco(ish) had been in touch about about meeting up here in Melbourne, and had exchanged mobile phone numbers. On Thursday morning, John received a text from Rich and we agreed to meet up at the Registration Desk in the Southern Cross Hotel.

So there we were on registering in the bowels of the Southern Cross Hotel with a handful of people we didn't know. (BTW, it just doesn't feel right registering for a convention without long queues - it was so quiet there that although no doubt extremely efficient, it didn't get the adrenalin going and the realisation that you really were at a big affair without the queues - is it just me, or do others feel this?) Anyway, there we were wondering when the madness was going to start when we recognised LynC - Oz fan who, with her now-dead partner Clive, had been the first fannish faces we had seen on our first trip out, when Justic Ackroyd (our supposed host) had been too busy to come out to the airport. This was the first of our reality checks - not only did she have kids, but they were teenagers now!

This was to become a theme throughout the weekend, which isn't surprising really given the 4-year gaps between each of our trips.

But back to Rich - we hung around for a bit but still no sign, so thought we'd wait upstairs, only to receive a text "I'm here, where're you?" - we'd missed him on the short journey up the escalator. Now, that's not so surprising - but what blew my mind was that Rich's text had gone from Australia via San Francisco to London and then on to a spot 200yds away from him in Melbourne!

Now THAT's science fiction!