UK PonyCon report, part 1: Friday – TunnelCon, PubCon, NoiseCon

Gee, Applejack, do you think there are Pony fans on this train?

It always seems to rain at UK PonyCon. Okay, the British weather in October is not known for its Mediterranean heat and sunshine, but even so. I stood at my local station on Friday morning, getting damp. I didn't mind that much, of course: I was going to my favourite event of the year! I hadn't arranged to meet anyone along the way, so I didn't have a specific schedule to keep to. It mostly wasn't a thrilling trip, one minor highlight being a Lotus Biscoff muffin in Costa. I'd meant to watch "Magical Mystery Cure" on the train, but somepony forgot to copy it onto his phone. D'oh!

There was happily one exception to the dullness of the train journey, which was that Oilyvalves joined me for the last leg from Derby Derpy to Nottingham Trottingham. We'd known for a while that this might happen as our schedules were similar, but we hadn't made any firm plans and had left it on an "if it happens, it happens" basis. The weather was pretty poor by this time, so it was nice to have something to lift my spirits, and since both of us had seen the S9 finale we didn't have to worry about spoilers. That wouldn't be the case later in the weekend!

We reached Nottingham a little earlier than I'd expected, and this left me a potentially annoying few minutes before my hotel check-in opened at 3 pm. Happily, fate smiled on me for a change and I met a few others including Fluffles (who I hadn't met in person before) at the tram stop. We said our hellos and had a little mini-meet before heading for our final destinations. I was in the Travelodge in the city centre and was assigned a first-floor room, which didn't thrill me: past experience told me it was very convenient and the staff were good, but that noise could be a problem. Yes indeed...

Scary secret tunnel. With litter bin

After check-in, I dumped my stuff and did the minimum possible preparation for later on. Oilyvalves, who knows Nottingham pretty well owing to living in the region, had offered to take people on a walk to a "secret tunnel" – the city is ribboned with the things – and since the rain had miraculously cleared up just in time, a number of us went for it. This was fun, since the tunnel in question is open to the public and big enough to drive a bus through (we sadly couldn't prove this by experiment) but is hidden away so well that you could walk right past its entrance without noticing.

After a quick change into a dry T-shirt at my Travelodge, I headed to the Roebuck pub less than five minutes' walk from the hotel, for a rendezvous with various other friends. We'd found the Roebuck to be a good Friday evening base the previous year, and so it proved this time as well. Meals were eaten, fish and chips for me, and (at least in my case) cider was drunk. People were silly. We talked about ponies. We avoided finale spoilers for the benefit of the several present who hadn't had time to catch up. It made for a most enjoyable few hours.

We did have quite a lot of people at our table by the time a few hours had gone by – I can't remember the exact number, but it certainly peaked at more than a dozen. This was great in the sense of creating a little "mini con" atmosphere, but maybe slightly less great in the sense of actually having enough room for plates! Staggering our meal orders did help a bit, and I was conscious that we were at least staying away from the England football match that was being shown in some other pubs. Give me a choice of people kicking a ball up and down a field or people stacking plastic ponies, and it's not really a contest.

Applejack inspecting my cider. Or so she claimed

In the end, many of us including me stayed in the pub until getting on for 11 pm. It was just so convivial and it felt so good to be able to talk about MLP openly to others who understood why ponies rocked. I can do that at meets of course, but not quite like this. One welcome new face to join our table was Mike (Cartoon Pony/Karma), who again I'd never met in person before. He'd travelled over from Ireland that day and had only arrived in Nottingham earlier in the evening. UKPC would be his first ever Pony convention, so at this point he remained in blissful ignorance of exactly what he'd let himself in for... ;)

Eventually I headed the few hundred yards back to my hotel and up the steps to the first floor, where a few other con-goers were staying. It turned out that Hawthorn was only three rooms down the same corridor! This wasn't the big con hotel – that was a Premier Inn almost opposite the venue, where the staff had put up a few pony things in welcome. We didn't get anything like that at the Travelodge, but even so it was nice to have that feeling of shared enterprise and converging on something exciting.

Sadly my actual night was a disaster. Maybe because of the football, the noise outside my window was truly horrendous, to the extent that I pulled my clothes back on and did something I've never done before: I went to reception at 3 am to ask if anyone could help. Someone could: a very friendly staffer named Barry adjusted my window seals so that the noise level was significantly lower. Even so, it was loud enough that I got about 20 minutes' sleep. I never sleep well before cons, but this was a new low. I gave up around 5.45 and had a shower, hoping things could only improve from here on in...

The stunning view from my hotel window