UK PonyConline report, part 1 (Friday)

TrainCon! Sort of. This is no. 2999 Lady of Legend

I'll never get this report on last weekend's UK PonyConline done if I don't get on with it, so I'm splitting it into bits. Today's short first instalment deals with the Friday. I hope you'll excuse me if I skim over some of the fine details, since the main event for me was an online "pre-meet" with a bunch of friends – ten or twelve of us, from memory. This wasn't a public event and so I don't think it would be appropriate to go into lots of detail about every little thing that was said. However, I can still give you the gist...

In pre-pandemic times some of us held "TrainCon" as we made our way by rail to our convention hotels and other weekend bases. Obviously this wasn't an option this year, but my local heritage railway is open again now and so I walked down a bit beforehand and saw a steam train or two to get me in the mood. I also made sure I had those nutritional essentials, cider and muffins, on hand. Incidentally, Maz (UK PonyCon's chair) mentioned later in the weekend that, at in-person cons, he has had to tell venue bar managers to stock more cider than they'd normally expect for the size of event. The power of Pony! :D

Convention essentials at the ready!

Around 7pm we leapt onto Discord (poor guy...) for the pre-meet. While it was of course not the same as being there in person in the pub, the first hour or so was so bouncy and fast-paced that it was closer than any other pre-online-con meet I can recall to having the same hyped-up atmosphere. Things mellowed and slowed down a little bit after that, though it was still very pleasant to be sharing the experience and chatting to friends with a convention around the corner.

I didn't stay all that late, I think until about 10 pm. Then I got a bit confused owing to the lack of crowds of football fans and pub crawlers yelling four storeys below my hotel bedroom window, something that is one of Nottingham city centre's less endearing features. (This would have been a bit of a problem in any case this time, as my house only has two storeys.) Still, the pre-meet had been a good start to what proved to be a very memorable weekend indeed...