UK PonyCon 2025 report, part six: Monday

Sunny ponders where the Maretime Bay Development Corporation went wrong

All good things must come to an end, and so it was with UK PonyCon 2025. This had been an extremely enjoyable convention for me. Not devoid of issues, of course, most of them connected either with the limited size of the venue or the completely unforeseeable fire that caused the hotel evacuation on the Sunday morning. Still, everyone seemed to pull together, and I think I'll remember this UKPC as having a particularly nice atmosphere once things got going.

After a nice sleep, I made sure of a long and soothing shower – if I'm going to shell out for a posher hotel room than usual, I'm damn well going to make the most of it! Then it was downstairs to meet a few friends for breakfast. Surprisingly and a little disappointingly, I found the Premier Inn brekky to be less good than the Travelodge one. Running out of blueberry muffins – and not replenishing them – was a definite black mark. I've never had that happen at any PI before. Still, the chat and friendship mattered more.

Hawthorn has ended up being the person who organises the farewell coffee meets after UKPC. I'm not sure even he knows quite how that happened, but everyone seems to be happy with the situation. We'd chosen the Pret on the concourse of New Street station, right by Ozzy the mechanical bull, for our meet this time around. It was certainly very convenient for those travelling by train, but it turned out to have the drawback of there being insufficient space inside.

Seriously, there were dozens of these packs being handed out!

That meant we all stood around just outside the Pret instead, albeit sometimes wandering in to buy a takeaway-but-not-really coffee. Now, standing around and looking awkward is a special talent most of us have, so other than being a little hard on the hooves it worked out all right. James arrived and threw even more packs of Kayou cards at us until we agreed to accept them. I picked up three, one of which was to give to a friend. I think there were probably about twenty of us there in total, albeit not all at once. We should probably find somewhere we can sit down next year, though!

After we'd broken up, as it was a nice day I had a quick poke around a couple of shops in Birmingham city centre before heading home. I managed to sneak in my first proper muffin of the entire convention (though I'd had a savoury breakfast muffin on the Sunday morning) thanks to a quick trip to Greggs. Apparently several Pony people hung around in town for quite a bit longer, Mike for example, but I didn't see any of them before I arrived back at Moor Street station.

And that was pretty much that! Moor Street is a pleasant enough place to be on a sunny lunchtime, and the train was on time, so I simply whiled away the time on the Worcester Shires Discord group and listening to fandom music on my earbuds. (Aviators. Ponyphonic. Replacer. Look, you know my music tastes by now, surely? And yes, "Sounds of 2017" is coming at some point. You're just not getting a more specific timeframe just yet!)

I always did say MLP needed a wider platform

Emerging from that very long parenthesis, I found myself back at Kidderminster. Pity. Still, I was ready to go home. UK PonyCon is never a cheap weekend, even with my Saturday night saver, but I'd got a lot out of it this year. You know what they say friendship is. Well, it's true.

Next time: the merch haul!