rather than just blasting out the whole email, which was … long … , here are the highlights

Gen Con Attributes Record-Breaking 2014 Numbers to Growing Partnership between Gamers and Indianapolis Community

INDIANAPOLIS (August 19, 2014)
Gen Con 2014, completed August 14-17 at the Indiana Convention Center, experienced another year of record attendance numbers and unprecedented growth. For the fourth consecutive year, Gen Con grew by more than 10%. This year, reaching more than 14% year-over-year growth with a weekend turnstile attendance of 184,699 and unique attendance of 56,614. This number surpasses 2013’s previous record of 49,530 unique attendees. Since 2009, Gen Con’s annual attendance has more than doubled.

Due to Gen Con’s expansion throughout the Indiana Convention Center, the show also featured record numbers of exhibitors (370+) and events (14,000+).
Gen Con 2015 will return to Indianapolis July 30 – August 2, 2015.

56,614 unique attendees.
No wonder the housing sold out so fast, and led to so much complaint & so many calls for the convention to move, usually to Las Vegas.
That’s a whole lotta nerds.

On a less numberical note, my Gen Con attending friends in the USA appear to have enjoyed themselves, and are hopefully emerging from the depths of the post-con doldrums, where, no matter how exciting your work is, you’d rather be gaming.

I slept in today, and it was awesome.

The one thing I ‘needed’ to get done today was picking up my train tickets for the trip to Dublin & back.
Promptly got onto the wrong DLR train, so ended up going to Euston Station via Stratford. Given the idiotic degree of interconnectedness of the London Underground, this wasn’t really much of a problem.
As a thought, how would you measure interconnectedness? Number of stations you can get to without changing trains?
The wee ticket contraption took a few goes at reading my card for ID purposes, but eventually spewed out a number of little cards for me.

From there it was a quick trip down to Leicester Square station, partially because it’s in the vicinity of a couple of bookstores, but mostly so that I could stand on the platform for the Piccadilly Line & hear the announcer say ‘Cockfosters’.

Don’t You Judge Me.

The Orcs Nest is tiny & filled to the gills with stuff, and pretty easy to find when you have more prepaid cellular data than you know what to do with. A return to Forbidden Planet (as last time, the bookstore, not the planet. I couldn’t go to the planet, for obvious reasons) netted me a couple more books, as I’m getting close to the end of Side Jobs, and have a full day of travel ahead.

I did investigate the options at the London Eye, but the prospect of a half-hour queue on not entirely healed feet did not appeal. Think I’ll save that for an early morning between Dublin & Zurich.

Something I’ve not mentioned previously is that most of the food options at the ExCeL centre, and near my hotel, are a bit meh.
Not bad, just … Meh.
Turns out that the good restaurants are hiding on the other side of the river, in the O2, so I had lunch at Slug & Lettuce, which was everything I’d hoped it would be.
~urp~

Plans for the rest of the day involve packing my bag for an early departure, pre-paying my hotel bill to make that a bit easier, and generally taking a bit of a light day.

Tick Tock Tick Tock

Well, all of that happened without incident.
The guy at the desk turned out to be something of a Star Wars fan, and had had no idea that conventions happened in the UK/Europe, so I told him about the wandering nature of WorldCons & EuroCons. He’d spent time in Ireland & had loved the place, and asked me to give them his regards; “The Polish guy at the Ibis Docklands says ‘Hi’.”
I looked up where the next few EuroCons were, but didn’t get a chance to tell him, which is a shame; Next year is St. Petersburg, and 2016 is either Barcelona or Wrocław, Poland.

John Wyndham – The Invisible Man Of Science Fiction
This was a documentary on John Wyndham, who was spectacularly closed-mouthed about himself & his past, and seems to have been quite an odd man.
This gave Wyndham & his works the sort of analysis I was hoping for from the Raumpatrouille Orion fan group presentation; Looking at what was happening at the time which influenced his works. As an example, Day Of The Triffids happened at around the same time as Lysenkoism in the USSR.
(And as a side note, my phone knew the name Lysenko, which is a little odd)

Beyond Blighty: World Steampunk
Three Germans & a South American talk about Steampunk, Clockpunk, Dieselpunk, Teslapunk, …
Or, more accurately, three Germans talk succinctly about the topic, and one South American craps on endlessly about his own works in ways that are possibly related to the topic, if anyone could follow what the hell he was talking about.
Some very good points about the eras of history no German wants to touch, and the knock-on effects of that; As soon as you have Steampunk in a united Germany, you’ve got the Empire, and everyone knows where that ended up.

Cruise Of The Gods
Feature length comedy drama starring Rob Brydon & Steve Coogan, about two actors who appeared in a 70’s children’s SF series (that looks like a cross between Blakes 7 and The Tomorrow People) – one who’s become a successful TV actor in the US (watch out for ‘Sherlock Holmes In Miami’!), and another whose career has floundered leaving him dependent on fandom and appearances at conventions (and forced by his agent to board the eponymous fan cruise).
I caught the end of this; May well have to track it down to watch the whole thing.

Comics Britannia – Anarchy In The UK
Another documentary, starting with Viz and going forward through 2000AD and into the career of Alan Moore.
Other people too, but lots of Alan Moore.

The Martians & Us – The End Of The World As We Know It
This was a screening of a documentary on end-of-the-world literature, and it did a pretty good job of looking at what was happening in the UK at the time of publishing.
I’d read a fair number of these, though I’d completely missed the point of Christopher Priest’s Fugue For A Darkening Island, and had thought it was an anti-immigration racist screed, much like many reviewers.

The State of the Anime Industry
This started and ended with ‘How Do You Solve A Problem Like Miyazaki’, and sort of expanded out to cover some history & developments in the industry.
I’m very tempted to pick up the book written by this presenter.
Something I’d found interesting was the idea that Studio Ghibli may go with the option of not replacing Miyazaki & his generation, and instead transition into being a museum of Ghibliness, with a demonstration/hobby studio as part of the ‘exhibits’.
Another suggestion made is that there is more & more of Miyazaki complaining about being brought out if retirement coming into films, starting with Howl’s Moving Castle, where the protagonist complains at length about being dragged away from what he wants to do by the needs of other people. That and the deliberate obfuscation of exactly who did what on a film.

Girl Genius Radio Plays
Old-Style on-stage radio play, filled with breaking a of the fourth wall & in-jokes. A lot of fun, especially if you like audience participation & groan worthy jokes.
I’ve no idea whether they were recording.

Writing Post-Colonialism
I missed the very start of this, so I’m hazy on what post-colonialism is defined as, but despite that, this was interesting.
More academic than science fictional, and a chunk of the audience seemed to be similarly academically inclined, and known to the panellists.
Something which occurred to me; Does the concern about immigration into first world countries by people who set up their own communities count as being worried about being on the other end of Colonialism?

London and Other Futures
I’ll be honest; The London panels are starting to blur together at this point.
Lets say that there’s a lot of material out there.
There was a point made about the rise of containerised shipping pretty much destroying the ‘go away to sea’ story, because you can’t anymore. Also the Underground showing up a lot in movies, either as a means of escape, or as an effective teleporter; The protagonist goes in here, comes out there, and who cares about the bits in between?
Oh, and a plea for people to stop taking photos of the London Eye, because they’re all the same & tedious.

The Bottom Up: The Fantastical World of Human Waste
Doing Your Business
Sanitation in SF, and the fact that few shows mention it at all.
This was double-booked with a burlesque workshop, which caused no end of bad jokes, and has me wondering whether any one has ever done a toilet-based burlesque routine. And if so, why?
The presenter, whose blog is linked above, does Loo Tours of London.

Remembering the Terran Trade Authority
For those who don’t know; TTA
I have a very second-hand copy of one of these, bought out of nostalgia, and I’d definitely pick up a couple of the others were they to become available.
This was a fantastic panel, described by the moderator as a tribute to Stewart Cowley, the editor/assembler/writer of the things, with Mr. Cowley and three of the contributing artists as panellists.

The whole TTA thing came out of wondering what happened to the images used on book covers, & noticing that there’s a coherent look to many of them. Cowley, despite having a contract forbidding him from actually writing, couldn’t find a writer who got the idea, so wrote the text himself. This came out when they wanted another book, but after the first one sold 800,000 copies, what were they going to do about it?

The Destruction Of London
I skipped out early on this, as it was basically a talk about six posters I’d already read, by the guy who’d made them, in the (noisy) exhibit/dealer hall. Sadly, the presenter didn’t have a good handle on projection, and every third word was “Ummm”.

Truth in Trash
Is there such a thing as Trash cinema or TV?
Not sure that a conclusion was reached, but a lot of fun was had, and there were some suggestions of things to watch, such as Supernatural, the Sabrina the Teenage Witch live-action series, Vampire Academy, & The Ghost Goes Gear.

Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates – World Premiere
A stage play of a very complicated story. They went with a minimalist set & combined chorus/stage ninja/bit-part troupe, plus some big screens to capture the parts of the story happening in the aisles, or at the back.
I’d read the book, so I could follow the story; From what the people around me were saying on the way out, it was baffling to those who hadn’t.
Also long.
A shade under three hours long.

Having just worked out that I can do a cut & paste from the nifty con schedule app, I’m going to do the programme items first.

• Fallen London – Recreating London in Games
  They’re taking a very wide stance on ‘games’ here; Anything from an RPG to a LARP to a Board Game to an online thing called Fallen London.
  The take-home, as it were, is that there’s so much stuff in London, in terms of history & mythology, and even geography, that there’s material for almost anything you want to do. Also that people seem to focus on Victorian London more than anything else.

  Something(s) I found myself wandering were;
  Is there a railway-building game based on the Underground? If you go with a Beck-esque schematic to simplify the lines you might be able to use tiles, or maybe wee plastic sticks?

  Alternatively, can you cross London Underground trains with Underground political movements, so that you’re linking positions/policies (Stations) with lines to build your platform?

• British Comics: Influences and Influencers
  Pretty much what it sounds like, with a lot of history of comics in Britain; The arrival of American comics leading to The Eagle, that sort of thing.
  To be honest, a lot of the names went by me unrecognised, and I’d probably be better off finding a book on the subject if I needed to know more.
• Fannish Inquisition
  This is the bit where groups bidding for future cons say their piece and answer questions.
  Kansas City 2016 were big on the BBQ, while Beijing went with ‘we are aliens from the future’ as an approach.
  Further out, 2017 is crowded with four bids, Dublin 2019 looks very organised with colour handouts & a secret bar, and there was nobody official there from NZ2020
• Urban Fantasy: London
  Why is it always the Victorian Era?
  There’s a fair bit of crossover with the games panel, as the same points & issues apply to both.
• The World at Worldcon: Eastern European and Baltic SF/F
  Yeah, …
  This could have been good, but was sandbagged by a panelist who was long-winded, rambling, pedantic, and spoke very halting English. Not a good combination.
  There were a few times when other panelists tried to shut him down, but it didn’t take.
• Sci-Fi London Shorts
  Short films, some of them products of a 48 hour film-making competition.

My con schedule is stored on my phone, thanks to a handy little app, so doing a summary will involve a bit of back-and-forth. Let’s see how it goes, shall we?

• Climate Catastrophes
  This was done by Jonathan Cowie, who was at Au Contrairé in 2010, and was basically an introduction to Earth Systems Science, specifically the role of life in changing the planet. Kind of interesting, though his answer to the question of “What Can We Do About Climate Change/Global Warming?” was a sobering ‘Go enjoy yourselves; We’ve been warning people for 40 years, and it’s only getting worse’
• Goliath
  An anime-esque War Of The Worlds sequel, where human fighting machines & heat rays are used to do battle with a second Martian invasion.
  Teddy Roosevelt as the Action Secretary of Defense was a nice touch, and the backdrop of WW1 starting & Irish Independence was interesting.
• Experimenting With Comics
  Mostly an artist talking about her own work, with reference to historical art & some of the more unusual approaches to comics.
• Raumpatrouille Orion Fangroup
  ~sigh~
  I’ve seen the movie version of this German SF TV show, where the episodes were cut together & edited into a single narrative, so I was looking forward to finding out more about it.
  Unfortunately, this was the bad sort of fan presentation, where they just want to tell you everything, with little thought given to structure or a coherent narrative in their talk. Clearly, people were fans, but that kind of worked against them.
  I snuck out early, as did another chap who wanted to avoid spoilers.
  this did give me the opportunity to go to …
• Getting London Wrong
  Thor would have needed to change trains to get back to Greenwich. Ben Aaronovich gets multicultural London right. Stop trying to do Cockney if you’ve never heard one.
  Basically, this was a lot of fun.
• No Adolf Inside: The Truth About German Fandom
  This was great. Very funny, covers a lot of German culture in a very short time.
  Wherever seven Germans gather, they’ll form a club. When there are more than ten people in the club, they split into two clubs & bicker.
  It covered Raumpatrouille Orion & the Perry Rhodan series, plus some oddities of German Publishing & the fact that there is no Germany-wide convention, but lots of regional ones instead.

I spent a short period of time at the NZ2020 Bid table, mostly because I helped Maree, who seems to be organising it, carry bags filled with cans of whipped cream. It turns out that these were for the Bid Party that night (I didn’t go: Too crowded, noisy, & annoying), and not as a supply of nitrous to while away the hours on the bid table.

Something I wasn’t expecting was the sudden appearance of blisters, which is making the trip to & from the hotel a little more annoying than I’d like.
On the plus side, there are gems like this in the ExCeL centre.

Badge Pickup, day one; I am so very glad that I wasn’t in this line.

Looking down into the Fan Village.

Looking into the Dealer Hall

Not quite an interior shot of the Dealer Hall, but it’s less dark.

Looking up from the Fan Village, which was effectively a hangout zone, plus bid tables and a cafe/bar.
I have no idea what the Pirate Moose flag is about, and, to be honest, I’m OK with that mystery.

This, I thought, was just kind of neat.

Woke up earlier than I’d like, sadly, and thus Wednesday changed from being an afternoon of tourist stuff into being a day where I picked up my badge & con books, then sort of chillaxed for the rest of the day.

Fran gave me a lift home mid-morning, and I picked up the con stuff a bit after that. Lunch was a couple of surprisingly good sandwiches from Tesco. (Or is it Tescoes? Must check)

I did spot a few people I knew, including Maree from NZ, who was trying to find out where to deliver, or at least stash, a large number of cans of L&P and every meringue they could lay their hands on.
I did get told that they were for the NZ in 2020 bid party, and that I’d be helping, but the conversation moved on before a “Nope; Not gonna happen” could be delivered.
Bid Table in the ‘Fan Village’? Absolutely.
Misc. volunteering for the Con. No trouble, unless you count my complete inability to contact, or be contacted by, anyone who could tell me anything about things I might be willing and able to do. (In the absence of such information, I’ve just been being generally helpful, mostly by telling people where to go. 3:) )
Bid Party, late at night, involving lots of people in a noise & chatter filled environment where I’ll not be able to hear one word in ten? Think I’ll pass. 🙂

Along the way, I took some pictures of the site for Lon Con. To be honest, I’m hazy as to the when of these images, so I’ve made my best guess.

Looking down into the badge pick-up area.
From the look of the crowds, or lack thereof, I’m guessing that this was taken just after I picked up my badge, the day before the con.

View of the western end of the ExCeL Centre, closest to my hotel.
If I’m right, I would have been standing at the end of the street the hotel was on, at about the point where I was asked for directions to the train a few days ago.
I’m still confident that my “Go until you hit that building, turn left” directions were correct.
The cranes, incidentally, are not real. Thought they were, at first, but a closer look revealed their insidious post-modernism; They’re only there as art pieces, because docks should have cranes.
Not real cranes, just things that look enough like them for a nice view.

View from outside the ExCeL Centre, looking back towards the hotel.
I suspect this photo was taken on a walk to the centre, the more I look at it, as I suspect the white-clad figure with the bag in this shot is the same one who’s in the previous shot, having been overtaken by me on the trudge across the plaza.

This was just a blatant Danger Mouse opportunity; I could not pass it up.

OK, I was trying to riff on the chorus in “Go West” (Pet Shop Boys version), but I’m not sure I got the right letter; Stupid double-vowel structures. 🙁

I was awake from 1am until about 4am, for reasons unknown, which is why there’s a great big brainspew about yesterday’s tourism. It may also explain any trifling incoherency in said brainspew.

I hit the breakfast zone at a bit before 7, and for a while was the only one there; People started drifting in from about 7, so I think I’ve found my time slot for a leisurely morning.

Currently, I’m chillaxing in the lobby on a comfy sofa, watching the heavily-accented people go by. There are a lot of French speakers, or at least what sounds like French from the few words I can pick out, and a solid representation of something which sounds Eastern European.
I cannot work out what the hotel staff converse with each other in; I’m almost hoping it’s some combination of a few things, the language of Hotels, like Taxilingua from Snow Crash.

Chris’ son Grant is going to be collecting me at 10, so I’ve got a little time to kill.
It might be worth doing a spot of planning for tourism things, mostly in terms of “What’s next to this” and “When’s likely to be a quiet time for that”

|o| /o/ |o| \o\ |o| /o/ |o| /o/ |o| \o\ |o|

OK, so there was a slight change in plan when Grant came down with something, so Chris (& Fran, his wife) came out to pick me up instead.

Little towns/villages in Essex look almost too much like what I’d expected them to; Narrow roads, brick buildings right on the edge of the footpath, not quite quaint but within an easy walk of it.

It was a really good day.
Got to meet the menagerie of three dogs, one of whom was very licky, and two cats, who mostly ignored me, in the manner of cats.

We went to Southend Pier & ride the rattly little train to the end, which was quite a lot of fun. Just the idea of a 1.3 mile long pier is kind of awesome, and gives a very different view of the Thames.
The weather did pick up while we were out there, & the degree of change in visibility over very short periods of time was noticeable. Also, as someone who’d walked out & then snuck into the train for the trip back told us, there’s no cover from the wind for most of it, so he didn’t feel like battling the cross-wind for the walk back.
Also the rain.
Such rain.

We got dinner at a carvery place on the way back; Must be the first time in years that I’ve been to one, and it was very nice. I had almost no idea what the chap with the knife was saying thanks to a strong accent from somewhere local, but he seemed to understand me OK.
Still have no idea what the hollow edible possibly pastry-based case thing was; I meant to ask, but forgot.

Mostly, this day was about catching up with Chris, meeting Fran, & talking about all sorts of stuff, often with a gaming bent to it.
The games stash there is both Mighty and Fearsome, and apparently represents only a portion of what has passed through the house over the years.

We played;

1. Station Master
   This is one of Chris’ games, using cards & a few little tokens, where you build up trains until they’re full and have variable amounts of investment in each train. Carriages are worth points, some carriages are worth negative points, & there’s the opportunity to shaft the other players by sandbagging trains they’ve got an interest in.I’ll admit to being a little confused by the rules as described, but once I saw them in play, no worries at all. It was interesting to watch the growth of ‘dump trains’, as people tried to get rid of the negative cards stinking up their hands.
   Quite fun, and has a bunch of opportunity for the sort of shaft thy neighbour tactics that I’ve seen in games like Fluxx or Groo.
2. Camel Up
   This ones a German Boardgame which Chris thinks will do well this year. It’s a humorous game, which I wasn’t aware the Germans did.
   To qualify that, all of the games which have previously been identified to me as German games have been very complicated & intricate, and often a bit mathematical. Camel Up … Isn’t.
   I thought, based on the box art, that this was Camel Cup, and given that it’s about betting on a camel race, it seemed fair, but we checked and no, it’s Camel Up.
   Basically, camels race around a pyramid, and you bet on them. The pyramid is used as the randomiser/dice shaker, and the whole thing has a fun comic-book look to it.This was a lot of fun; It’s difficult to take a bad bet seriously with graphics like that, which to me at least makes it easier to enjoy the game.
3. Mondo
   Probably another German one, though I’m not certain of that.This one’s about picking up little landscape tiles to build an island, or islands if you grab a lot of water, trying to make sure that the edges match so that the patches of Forest & Grassland & Desert & Water make sense.
   Of course, once you’ve placed a tile, there’s no moving it, and everyone is drawing from the same pile of tiles, and you’re all doing this at the same time.
   Did I mention the ticking countdown timer?

   This was kind of relaxing, like doing a jigsaw puzzle. With a time limit. And competition for the pieces.

Ended up staying up to about 1am, which had some consequences on Wednesday, & I stayed over; Fran & Chris gave me their bed & went with the lounge, at least in part to prevent night-time animal incidents.

Following on from the last post, breakfast eventually happened, once most of the crowd had cleared; All that was left seemed to be a French-speaking group of probably high-school aged girls & some slightly shell-shocked staff. The meal itself was a pretty standard Ibis buffet, with a coffee machine which did Mochas, and rather less room to move around than you’d like when it got crowded.

Post-Breakfast I headed off towards Euston Station, as I’m going to need to get there by 8:00am to catch the train to Dublin, while lugging the bag of doom (kind of regretting not having one with wheels; it’s a bit cumbersome to carry effortlessly, and I have some bruising from slinging it over one shoulder. if I spot a bag-type shop, I’ll see whether they have an appropriate shoulder strap, or something I can repurpose with a couple of carabiners or something), so knowing the way seemed like a good idea.
I’m really enjoying being able to vanish underground & reappear somewhere else using the Underground; It’s like teleporting with white tiles & odd smells. Plus, as a tourist, it’s kind of nice to know that, once I’ve found a station, getting back to the hotel will be comparatively simple, if topologically complex.

Found Euston Station without incident, then hopped a train to visit Forbidden Planet, as suggested by Tanja.
That’s a lot of bookstore.
Could have bought any number of things, but limited myself to a Dresden Files book I didn’t already have, as luggage weight may become an issue after two conventions.

By the pure chance of someone asking me whether she was going the right way for Trafalgar Square, and someone else telling her when I couldn’t, I learned that Trafalgar Square was that-a-way, so I went for a wander, which is how I happened across St. Martin In The Fields.
There was a concert about to start, so I didn’t poke about in the church itself, and instead read the historical bits & looked at the models & pictures.

Trafalgar Square had this;

I met a London Ambassador (help for the tourists, or possibly just the confused & lost) who wasn’t a fan of the Big Blue Rooster, as it detracted from the Gravitas of the square, but would have been OK with a statue of a Pigeon, as long as it wasn’t blue. A more classical pigeon, from a more civilised time.

It started raining, so I hid under a tree & got chatting with one of the other cowerers about the weather, as you do. Turns out there was a short but very powerful rain + wind event yesterday, strong enough to blow a rack of clothes onto him at the entrance to a shop, more or less at the same time as I was at Paddington, which would nicely explain it raining inside the station.

I spotted a map showing the way to the river, then found the Admiralty Arch more or less accidentally, so I wandered through to find St. James’s Park and a somewhat familiar road.

The weather couldn’t decide what it wanted to do on the sun/rain stakes, so walking under trees was quite nice.
Ended up outside Buckingham Palace, watching a couple of (I assume) fantastically bored guards march back & forth in fancy historic uniforms with massive hats, carrying something in the L85 assault rifle line.

Back through the park, with increasingly tired feet, and through a display of WW1 pictures & art, set up for the centenary.
Learned a few things, such as the role of Zeppelins in attacks on England; Don’t think that ever got covered in history classes at school, as it was all trench warfare & Gallipoli.
There was also this;

A bit south, while looking for the underground station, I did manage to take a very London sort of picture.

I’m glad that this sort of thing is so very easy to get to on public transport, as I wasn’t really in the mood to do any wandering around looking at famous buildings; The prospect of a cold drink and putting my feet up appealed more. Fortunately, it’ll be piss-easy to get back there when I do want to read plaques & take obnoxious clock-tower selfies.

I took the gondola back from the O2 / Millennium Dome,

seen here impersonating some form of alien bioconstruction, mostly because I could, and because it’s close to my hotel. Also, Gondola!!

Is it just me, or does the Millennium Dome look like an alien spacecraft which hasn’t really figured out this ‘camouflage’ thing yet, and is going for Circus Tent Meets Construction Crane?

I got a UK SIMcard, so I can now make calls & do that whole mobile Internet thing, at least while I’m in the UK. The whole sales process seemed a bit dodgy, and the store was very much a hole in the wall sort of outlet, but it seems to work, so if there’s a scam there, it’s one that gives me unlimited texts, 500 minutes of call time, and 2GB of data for the next month.
I can live with that, though I did need to do some digging to find my mobile number.
Chris, rightly, laughed at me when I said that I had no idea what my mobile number was; I found out, once I got back to NZ, that it was written on the SIM, but I also found a thing you could ‘dial’ which would tell you the number. Behold!

Thanks to Skippy The Wonder SIM, I was able to contact Chris in Essex, to arrange visiting him tomorrow. I’d been planning to take the train, as it seemed pretty easy from here, with only a couple of connections to make, but he wouldn’t hear of it, and has arranged for his son to come & pick me up instead.
I’m guessing he knows something about that train trip that they don’t mention in the brochures, even if it’s just “That is a long and tedious train journey, they charge like a wounded bull, and it’s much quicker to drive”.

That’s pretty much been my day; Day One in London, and it went well, I think.
Managed to give myself a couple of blisters, which wasn’t really part of the plan, but other than that, a good day.