A year on from the return to conventions, are we back to normal now?

This one gets the "musing" tag as I'm not making any attempt to write a serious piece full of references and evidence. It's just a case of a few thoughts. Anyway: UK PonyCon 2021 was the first in-person Pony convention in this country for two years, and I think (I stand to be corrected!) the first in Europe as a whole since Hearth's Warming Con in the Netherlands closed on 1st March 2020. Certainly we weren't at all sure what it was going to be like. Fortunately the answer was: really very good indeed!

However, it still wasn't like UKPC had been up until 2019. There were vaccine status checks at the door, for a start. Masks, while not required, were fairly common on the first day especially. There was no music concert. Some stuff was rearranged to allow for social distancing. And so on and so forth. I remember wondering whether mass singing would be allowed – fortunately it was, since that allowed us a memorable singalong of "Danger, Danger". (It was also the first European con of the G5 era!)

For UK PonyCon 2022, much of the extra stuff wasn't there. Masks weren't absent entirely, but at a guess I'd say use was down below 5% of attendees. There were no vaccine or test mandates, merely a note on the con's website telling people not to attend if they had Covid, and a reminder in the con book to "wash your hooves with water and soap". (Good advice anyway!) Live music was back on Saturday evening, as was the bar selling pony-themed cocktails. Attendance was back to not that far off 2019 levels.

Did people still do a test before attending? Yeah, at least some of us did. But I think we've largely reached the point at which Covid has become just another one of the lovely collection of grottiness that goes into the bucket marked "con crud". (In any case, there's some reason to believe it'll be good bad old flu that's the bigger deal in Europe this winter.) When I attended UKPC in 2021 there was still quite a discernible jumpiness about Covid specifically. At UKPC 2022 that feeling was pretty much absent.

It's interesting that this change doesn't seem to have taken place in North America. Looking up a few of the major US MLP cons' websites recently, they showed various combinations of masks, vaccines and testing still mandated. One convention's Covid policy (for 2022) ran to more than 3,000 words. That would be unheard of in Europe now. I'm not here to be judgemental on this. But it's maybe worth noting that anyone crossing the Atlantic (in either direction) for a Pony con may find the attitude and setup regarding Covid quite different from what they're used to at home.

So... I supposethe answer to my subject line question is probably: in Europe, yes, or pretty close to. In America, not just yet.