DiaCon diary, day one, part three

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III

I knew that the convention was being held in the University of Kent at Canterbory, which I had seen a couple of times and of which I knew in general that it was built not in the city itself, but in a campus some way off. I found a bus whose route seemed to lead there (the Canterbury bus timetables are unbelievably useless, indicating only the three or four main stops) and asked the driver whether that was the case. He said it was.

He did not say that it then would go straight out of the University again, and north to the coast.

By the time I'd realized what was going on, we were at least half a mile away from the nearest University building. Half a mile of rugged, hilly Kent countryside, such as I just described; and the weather, though not hot, was humid. And bear in mind that the University - as I was discovering - is very widely spread indeed, and that just to get in sight of it is by no means the end of your problems.

Things began to improve dramatically when I located an office called "hospitality". A charming young lady with a smile most salesmen would kill for understood what I'd come for with a minimum of palaver, and efficiently pointed me in the right direction. Better still, there was a water cooler in the corner, and it soon saw its stock diminished. Cold water after hours of travel and who knows how much road in the humid heat. Bliss!

The University is clearly designed for expansion; the campus is enrmous, and only built up in the centre. Even so, it isn't small. Rutherford Hall, where I and many other convention attendees slept, is a large and curiously designed modern building (the whole university is uncompromisingly modernist in design, although softened by large areas of garden, grass and trees) which has the effect of a labyrinth on newcomers. I suspect that somewhere in one of the less frequented corridors there must lie the bones of a few first-year students who never found their way out. Seriously, I spent most of my first day in there lost - although that was in part my choice, because I'd made up my mind that if I didn't learn the pattern then, there would be Hell to pay afterwards.

Eventually, one by one, I found the people I knew. Curiously, it was lazy_neutrino, whom I'd never met in person before, whom I met first; and as soon as we'd understood who each other was or were, I got a real-life warm squeezy hug, which frankly made me feel better. lazy_neutrino looks a good bit younger than she is, but not any nicer - she looks like a sweet person, and she is. Then I found kennahijja - the most extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps, in fandom: a soft-spoken woman who somehow manages to look smaller than she is, unassuming to a fault, naturally gentle - and with the incongruous gift of the greatest and most sinister imagination in fandom. She wears her genius like something found by chance in the street and with which she did not quite know what to do; and when I say "genius", I mean exactly what I say. And there, also, was chthonia, a naturally beautiful and somewhat ageless woman who, when she can find the time, writes fantastic fanfic.

These were the people I knew, and looked forward to meeting, and whom to meet immediately made that day a red-letter day; but there were many others, and many events to attend. I'll get to these in time.