I don't get round to these things quickly, but this is, at least in part, a report on my family's visit to Eastercon. This year the British National Science Fiction Convention was practically on our doorstep, just the other side of London, at Heathrow.

As with two years ago, my son wanted to come. And since my daughter did as well, my beloved bit the bullet and came along too. SF isn’t totally her thing, but I think she may have enjoyed the weekend more than any of us.

The telling detail was this: there are lots of things to do.

I tend to use cons as a way of seeing friends that I haven’t seen for a while – often not since the last con I was at. So I mainly hang out in the bar. Or that, at least, is the impression I gave – give – to people who don’t go to cons.

In fact, I have always gone to programme items. I guess I just never made a big thing of them when I got home.

This con – Odyssey 2010 – had a particularly good set of programme items for kids. There were hands-on science workshops, making Dalek cakes, and building string-propelled robots (my son won a prize for the best ramp-mounting attempt). And not least, a thrilling battle between various knights of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA).

The programme was full of fascinating and fun things, many of which I wanted to see, but didn’t manage to, as ever.

And of course, I saw a lot of old friends, and had a good time hanging out in the bar with them.

We only stayed for the Friday and Saturday nights, to keep costs down. But after going home on the Sunday (and watching the new Doctor Who again), we went back on the Monday, and spent most of the day back at the Radisson Radisson.

Travelling all across London was a bit of drag, but it was a lot shorter than many people’s journeys. And of course, there was absolutely no chance of [ash-induced delays] volcano.

Am I a bad person because I found all the volcanic disruption kind of amusing and quite fun, really? The cloudless and contrail-free blue skies over London were gorgeous, and it was interesting to follow people’s tweets of how they were striving to get home. And a world with a lot fewer flights is something we’re probably going to have to face in the future.

What annoyed me about it all were the idiots who blamed the government. Marginally more sensible than blaming ‘god’, I suppose1, but even if anything other than sending in the Navy had been the government’s decision, can you imagine the fuss if flights had been allowed to go ahead, and there had been a disaster?

Plus, the idea of getting a trip home on the Ark Royal is pretty cool.

  1. As somebody said, if that's an act of god, then it's a pretty limited kind of omnipotent deity. ↩