Eastercon and beyond

We are back from Eastercon and the Clarke Awards. It has been an exceptionally busy week. We had a good convention, mainly due to seeing a lot of good folk and the fact that we stayed with my cousin, rather than the hotel (which was simply unaffordable). Most of the complaints regarding the convention have been to do with the prices at the Hilton - they did put on a con rate, which was OK, but I did not regard food prices in the hotel as acceptable and thus we ate outside (in Henley in Arden, which is lovely, or the pub in my cousin's village, ditto).

Warwickshire and Gloucestershire were glorious, although we were a bit disconcerted by the ongoing riots in Bristol. These erupted at the weekend, when the cops raided a squat known in magnificently post-modern fashion as Telepathic Heights, in Stokes Croft. I've been unable to get a grip on this from the media and am indebted to steepholm for some far more balanced and nuanced reporting.

We then went up to London on Wednesday for the Clarke Awards - these went well and as you presumably know, Lauren Beukes won for Zoo City. I have found the judging to be a very pleasant and amicable experience and look forward to repeating it after my gap year for 2013. Great to see everyone and many thanks to purplecthulhu for hosting us at Cthulhu Towers - thanks, too, to A and H for introducing us to the delightful Little Georgia restaurant. I like Hackney and we also went to the Dove, which is one of my favourite London pubs. We wandered around Whitechapel market y'day buying unusual vegetables and drove home through an increasingly busy London.

I have seen some of the wedding - generally I liked it, though not an enormous fan of the monarchy or of weddings. But I do like the clothes and the jewellery, and Britain does put on a good pageant when it puts its mind to it, which bodes well for the Olympics. Kate M's dress was lovely, the Westminster trees looked great and there are some rather odd druidic resonances throughout the whole thing.