Observations from the way of folly

If you gave up coffee for Lent, it is not wise to restart with a large cup of your office's fabled triple-strength espresso.

I suspect the path of wisdom would lead me not to restart at all.

The cartoons of coffee-driven enthusiasm never mention the persistent low-level back-of-the-headache and the strange taste in your mouth; they remind you that this is in fact plant-alkaloid poisoning.

Eastercon

Along with about half my friends list, I spent the Easter weekend in a hotel near Heathrow airport, at a science fiction convention. Apparently it was the biggest Eastercon for twenty years, but it didn't feel especially crowded.

It was excellent; really without notably annoying flaws. I slept fifteen hours on Friday night, danced wildly until 2am on Saturday, and slept sensibly on Sunday. The rooms had ceilings and decent sound systems, the buffet suppers were mostly Tasty Stew but that's what you want, the infinite cooked breakfasts mean there is now four pounds more fivemack than there was on Thursday. There was lots of space in which you could hear yourself think, there were cheap soft drinks and cheap potatoes so you could keep yourself fed and watered while buying books. A complete success of a con. annafdd was there, which is on its own enough to make any weekend a good weekend. And Mitch Benn, who I'd never previously encountered.

I was on a couple of panels, which seemed to go well, though my observation that, by a lot of common Utopian metrics, life as a citizen of any country in contemporary Western Europe is near enough Utopian did not go down well - does Utopia require that injustice is absent, rather than merely rare, well-reported and noted as bad?

I was not obviously worse prepared or significantly less sure what I was doing than anyone else on the panels, and any panel with the infinitely erudite and impressively composed Edward James on is predestined to reasonably glorious success. I bought nine books, which is much more sensible restraint than the last Eastercon I went to; since I donated a year's worth of do-not-wish-to-reread books to be auctioned for the Alzheimer's Trust, I actually left with lighter bags than I came with.