Redemption was the con I was most looking forward to attending this year and it didn't disappoint...

See my pics here Redemption pics and you'll also find pics of the event on Steve Rogerson's site. 

So What's the Story?

FRIDAY
My planned early start went wrong pretty early on when it took longer than I'd thought it would to sign a new property lease - this left me running an hour late before I'd even got underway.  A few phone calls later and all the pickups were rearranged and I was on my way to the first of them.  Jon Crew and and his flatmate were running the murder mystery for the weekend and my first stop was picking up all the boxes and bags they needed to take to redemption.  This turned out to be enough boxes and bags to fill up my boot - hopefully Claire was going to be a light packer!  Next stop was collecting Claire and Emma from Claire's house.  Finally, we were all squeezed into my car with our luggage and on our way to redemption.

Got to the hotel around 2pm and found that it had started to snow as we unpacked our bags from the car.  I'd stayed at the hotel before some years ago and was pleased to see that their helpful attitude and friendly manner was unchanged.  The layout of the hotel and the rooms used by the con worked out very well; its surprising how much of a difference this can make to the enjoyment factor of a con (witness Starfleet Ball and Cult TV) my only criticism of the hotel was that it was difficult/impossible to connect up to the internet from some of the rooms (including mine) and I was getting serious withdrawal symptoms by the Saturday. 

After mucking the hotel about a bit by changing rooms a couple of times I eventually settled on a large ground floor room. No time to unpack or anything though, as I was already 5 minutes late for my panel by this time.  I'd never been involved in a panel before, so I was more than a bit nervous.  This wasn't helped by my arriving late to find everyone waiting for me.  After a couple of minutes though, we were soon happily discussing Tarrant's good and bad points and it was really nice to see everyone joining in and the hour soon flew past.

Next was a spell at the bar, where I soon realised I was hungry.  I ate from the bar menu - it didn't taste particularly appetising, but at least it wasn't expensive.  After eating, I headed down to Sainsbury's to stock up for the freedom city party and came across more snow. Then it was back to the bar to catch up with new arrivals.

The opening ceremony was informative and entertaining, with the introductory speeches from the candidates for the Ruler of the Universe competition and the start of the Murder Mystery following the apparent death of Captain Sheridon on stage.   This is the first con I've been to where I didn't sit there squirming in my seat after 5 minutes!   We had a go at the pub quiz after the ceremony (didn't manage to do all that well), before heading to my room to set up for the party with one or two early arrivals.  Many thanks to Alison for bringing music stuff.

I was feeling more than a little under the weather (still hadn't recovered from the recurring cold I've had since Cult TV), but I did my best to be a good hostess - mainly by supplying lots of food and drink. I flaked out around 2am and simply shut the connecting door on the party from the other room... I think the party wound down around 3am.

SATURDAY
Managed to make it down to breakfast, which turned out to be well catered. Then I was on another panel - are the B7 radio plays canon or bull?  Enjoyed this one immensely and once again it was good to see everyone joining in the debate.

I went along to the Cabaret rehearsal, but as neither Emma or I were feeling 100% it was already looking doubtful whether we would make it. Between us we downed an impressive quantity of drugs and we both took a long nap, but in the end we had call on our fellow Mountie Louise to cancel our act.

I headed downstairs to join the rest of the group at around 6pm and we decided to have dinner at the posh restaurant rather than the brasserie.  Dinner turned out to be a relaxing but lengthy affair - the food was good, the wine drinkable and the company entertaining. Since there were only a dozen or so people at the restaurant, we assumed that we'd have very attentive service from the waiters, but that was definitely not the case! In fact the service was so slow we missed most of the fancy dress and cabaret acts.

Emma surfaced in time to join us at the disco for an hour or so and then Emma assembled the Wobblevision crew. An episode was selected and characters cast, then we scurried off to locate appropriate props and costumes.  Emma completed photographing all the scenes with her usual professional speed, despite the shooting schedule being severely disrupted by the Moon disk massacre by Michael Sheard (check out  Emma's website  for the full Wobblevision pics and outtakes).

I wanted to go to the slash turkey reading (convinced that my one and only effort at fanfic was bound to be among them), but found I was too tired and was still feeling unwell.

SUNDAY
Made it down to breakfast again and then spent a happy hour conducting the poster campaign for Spike with John.  We were too lazy and disorganised to do our own posters, so our campaign consisted of spoiling the other candidates' posters by plastering them with our "Vila's Royal Mounties say: Vote Spike" stickers.  Louise had also made us some very eye-catching badges and we were going to be campaigning in full uniform for the hustings.

Took a look at the program and realised I'd missed one of my panels on Saturday...oops!

I headed upstairs to change into uniform and headed for the hustings.  The clangers failed to turn up for this, which lost them many votes I think. Spike easily swayed the restless crowd (hey, I'm not biased!) and it looked as though we were in with a chance. When it came to the voting, Vila's Royal Mounties had decided to sponsor the ballot boxes and I spent a happy hour tormenting Steve by using heavy persuasion techniques with all the voters that dared to come near the ballot boxes. I think our tactics worked very well - spike came third and both the candidates who beat him had photocopied ballot papers to augment their votes! We stickered everyone we could find, including all the other candidates except the clangers.

Steve's torment came to an end when I was bribed (with a double baileys) by David Walsh to stay away from the voting area. Then it was time for Gareth's talk, which was interrupted at one point by Michael Sheard's troops.

The closing ceremony followed and was also more entertaining than I'd expected. The b7 2001 movie was hilarious and only the prize giving (inevitably) dragged on a bit.

The convention wound down rapidly after that and I was bored for the first time during the weekend. I went to watch some of the B7 episodes that were going to be shown that evening, but Eddie had accidentally left the tapes behind. Oh well, back to the bar then. Suddenly remembered we still had stuff left over from the party, so John, Claire and I went back to scoff some more food and reflect on the events of the con. I headed back to the bar as the slash debate participants were congregating there, so I had a nice chat with some of the people I hadn't had a chance to catch up with earlier. Thanks to Ivan for fetching a slice of wedding cake and a cushion for me (um, well...i might have lied a teeny bit about having a broken leg)...

MONDAY
Made it down to breakfast for a record third time, then it was off to my room to pack.  A very late request from Steve for a lift meant some hasty rearranging of luggage and occupants of our 2 cars, especially when we saw how much luggage Steve had!   We managed to squeeze everybody in and after a brief reunion for lunch at the service station we left the con behind and went our separate ways...

My overall impression? - .......... I guess it helped that I knew many people already, but apart from that small lull on Sunday evening (and that was ALL Eddie's fault for forgetting to bring the videos!) I felt spoilt for choice on activities to get involved with and don't recall feeling bored or irritated at any time. I didn't manage to get to nearly as many panels and events as I would have liked to attend - there was certainly plenty to do during most of the con and I'd definitely go again.