Saturday was more of a working day for me. As a member of the listener team at the Con, I had a number of shifts I had to be available for – either as a roaming Listener (keeping being available for anyone who wants to approach for help or being called in to deal with issues) or at one of the listener desks (these being in the foyer of the CCD, the main con area, or the information desk at Point Square).
The Beckett Bridge over the Liffey, taken from the CCD
This day I was scheduled to be at the Point information desk at 9am until lunch time. Which would have been fine, still not an early start for me even with the slightly longer trek to Point square from my accomodation, had it not been for the Great Breakfast Crisis.
You see, Dublin apparently does not wake up before 930 on a Saturday. Or at least the part of Dublin the conference was in doesn’t. I guess because it is mostly university and conference facilities and no sensible student is up before midday on a weekend and any conference attendee is, of course, safely in a hotel with a breakfast bar. Apart from me, that is…
So the cafe I had breakfast in on Friday (that did lovely GF bacon sandwiches) was not open when I walked past not long after 8, nor was the restaurant that promised Omlettes I spotted on Friday night and wanted to try out. Even the Starbucks at the cinema was closed. So I had to sit at the info desk breakfast and coffee free until Ed Fortune (SF journalist, Podcaster and old friend from university) came to rescue bringing coffee. Thus saving the universe (or at least Dublin) from the evil that is uncaffeinated me. Actually, this was part of some strange, mystic confluence thing where several of my old friends from university just happened to turn up at that location. Iain and Janet Clark (both exhibiting in the art room that was located in Point), Ed, Russell Smith and me. I knew there was something story based about to happen when Iain walked up to the desk and said “We’re putting the band back together.”
One journalist, two writers and two artists… it’s early in the morning, none of them smoke, they’re out of booze, it’s light and they don’t have sunglasses…
You’d think we were all there for the same conference or something…
Most of my morning was spent dealing with info desk enquiries rather than actually being a Listener, which was fine because, to be honest, like First Aiders, Listeners at events are people you really prefer to be not doing much because it means nothing bad is happening.
After lunch, I headed to a Kaffeeklatsch hosted by Roz Kaveney, having been thoroughly impressed by her during our Thursday Panel. There followed an entertaining conversation (during which, yes, Pennyworth was mentioned again…) that covered a lot of UK SFF literary history and during which I found myself wishing I knew what had happened to my copies of Temps and Eurotemps (long ago lost, likely in some appropriate bureaucratic mess of a house move) as I would have loved to have had a signature. I may have to buy them again…
By some miracle, I actually managed to have an early night. Mostly because many of the people I usually hang out with at the bar had gone to the Masquerade and I was too lazy to bother going to get a wristband for it. Though I did spoil my early night by staying up late editing photos instead…
Those of you who follow this blog regularly (I’m sure there are a few of you…) will know that my ability to keep a consistant way of writing about events is somewhat sporadic. For 
In this, I was joined by 
we to Frankenstein’s Dream?” and I was with Dr. Helen Pennington (Plant scientist from DEFRA) and Heidi Lyshol (of the Norweigan Institute for Public Health). I was actually a little nervous about being on stage with some very eminent names in science with my mere MPhil and teaching background (I guess it could have been worse… someone of the academic oopmh of Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell could have been there, even though her area is more physics) but it worked out great and we had a wonderful discussion with lots of audience questions and the line “We could do that but it would be just slightly unethical” was uttered many times. We touched upon cloning, 3D printing of organs, head transplants, building a complete body out of 3D printed organs and several other bizarre applications of biology, medicine and engineering. I also got to talk about gerontology, which is my secondary area of expertise after immunology, and discuss things like the calorie restriction diets. In all a fun panel.
