Early Arrival - Ssrienna's Story Part 1

by Jan Uzzell (Ssrienna)

Being the impatient person that I am, I had to arrive on Thursday!

My husband agreed to drive me up, so that he could have the car. I was hoping to have introduced him to people, but with the parking charges at 0 to 30 mins - free and 30 mins to next time slot - £5, we decided not (L). However, he was able to see my room before he left.

I decided to be a good con person and “Go To Ops” to see if I could help. That’s where I got my Gopher badge and followed the other gophers to Registration, having helped unload a large white van with LOTS of boxes. All of which were books ready to give out at Registration on Fri and Sat.

I then joined the people in the room setting stuff up for Registration on the afore mentioned days. Managed to get my envelope early (as I was helping) so with “Ssirienna” in place I felt much more real! We then started a huge circular treadmill stuffing goodie bags ready for the masses. So children, how do we stuff a DW Goodie Bag? Grab bag and put one of everything from a long table (pens, bookmarks, programmes, booklets, balloons, etc), hand to the nice people on the end and repeat!

As we were obviously a chain gang, Xris (Chris Boote) started us singing to pass the time away. I think we got all the way through the Rocky Horror sound track, but we may have made it only as far as “Creature of the Night”

Then it was a flurry of meeting people as they arrived – Lottie for the main and I started thanking her for making my hooped skirt to go with my Maskerade costume (I think I stopped thanking her on Monday?). My apologies if I missed people’s names but we heard that over 400 people had arrived on Thursday!!

Then there was the insanity of the “Unofficial Fiendishly Difficult Pub Quiz” where I was on a table with Winterbay, Marlies, Goofgiant, Red Head, Torak and his wife (whose name escapes me now – I blame the alcohol!), Fi and others – we called ourselves “Smwgrttf” (or something like that) with (bless you) in brackets. Our idea being that when it was read out we’d all shout “Bless You” unfortunately we’d added that at the top so it was read out at the same time as we shouted it – so the joke got lost a bit – but we laughed!

The winners of the Quiz, who cheated as they had Min Lacey on their team, got 24 points! Um… we didn’t but I don’t think we were last on 16, which we thought was rather good! Then there was Biers and drinking and some singing and I got to bed somewhere round midnight.