What follows is the story behind my weekend, the incident with the hospital, and the photo above.

I don’t like writing blogs like this or holiday blogs. So much happened over the weekend that it’s gonna be a really long blog just to cover some of it, and it’s likely of no interest to anyone but me, so if you wanna skip the details, jump straight to the final paragraph for a summary.

Last weekend I was in Heathrow again for a Buffy / Angel con.

The cons are fun, but the celeb bits are really kinda irrelevant now, just the parties and the group of us spending a long weekend drinking in a hotel is why these things are so much fun.

After a horrible journey last year, with train some of the way, and replacement coach service for the rest, I muttered long and hard that there must be an easier way to get to Heathrow Airport for the con. As I sat at the Airport waiting for my coach back, and planes flew in overhead to land it suddenly hit me … of course there was an easier way to get to the Airport … I could drive!

However my inability to drive without speeding, and the dawning of the obvious meant that this year I flew.

It was cheaper than the train, comfier, free newspapers (subject of a future blog), free food, only took 30 minutes, and more importantly .. flying made me feel important!. Yay for flying.

I was first there and booked into the room we were sharing (in the process messing up the rest of the parties room bookings).

Between 12 of us we’d booked 4 rooms, ours was the biggest, and became the room everyone hung out in (much to the muttering of our neighbours). Over the course of the weekend, hotel staff were called to patrol the corridors near our room on a number of occasions, they never caught us tho!

We had to put the Do Not Disturb sign on our door for the entire weekend to stop maids coming in and a) seeing the state of the room and throwing us out, and b) seeing there were more people staying than we’d paid for.. [cough] ..

The con was cool, got signatures and photos of me with a few of the Angel and Firefly folk I hadn’t met before, will put them here when they’re scanned in.

On the first night one of Brett’s mates came along, she was from Finland, and got very drunk.

In the morning Brett phoned the hospital to see how she was (after getting her stomach pumped), to be told she’d tried to escape a few times during the night.

When we went downstairs a bit later, she was stood at reception, still attached to a drip bag. She’d succeeded in escaping this time. The hospital phoned a little later saying she could keep the drip bag, but could they have the drip stand back please. They got a little annoyed with us that instead of showing proper concern for a missing bit of hospital property, we were rolling around laughing at the idea of Lotta escaping still attached to the metal drip stand.

On Halloween night everyone dressed up, except for me. We’d planned to go as the zombies out of Thriller, with Spike going as Michael Jackson. I was too lazy to make a zombie costume though (ripping old clothes was too much like hard work for me!), but when we got to the party, everyone was taking photos of our group, and I felt left out, so I ran to the nearest garage, bought some fake scars and did my own make up. Considering the scars cost less than two quid, I was really proud of them, and didn’t want to take them off the next day. They did come off in the shower though, otherwise I’d still have them on today.

We all stayed an extra day after the con had finished, a day to mooch (and drink).

I had such a lot of fun, there are more cons next year (supposedly the last Buffy one), and I can’t wait!

Summary (for those who skipped the detail): Buffy/Angel con, lots of drinking, lots of fun, hospital shenanigans, Halloween costumes.