The Bob drink: a preliminary report
Thanks to all of you who turned up on Saturday night. I counted 15 in all, including me, which is more than respectable. These were Jams*, Kellie*, Francis*, Max, Sue, Jim, Darryl, Mikey E, Carl*, Keith, Daniel, Flesh and two other halves of bloggers who are of course also human beings in their own right.(Asterisks denote posts on the topic of the drink.)
I got fairly drunk. No blows were traded. No papparazzi were present. No one was exactly as I imagined them. Everyone was nice. My main regret is there were too many people for me to manage to talk to everyone properly, or indeed anyone at any length.
A preliminary statistical analysis reveals more details on the demographic.
At least 33% are resident in the London Boroughs of Lewisham or Greenwich. At least 40% are current or former Green Party members. At least 13% have a strong Danish connection. At least 26% have a strong Irish connection. At least 26% have a strong Essex connection. At least 40% are in gemisht Jewish/non-Jewish relationships. More than I care to admit had excess facial hair. Fewer than I expected drank ale as opposed to lager.
I got fairly drunk. No blows were traded. No papparazzi were present. No one was exactly as I imagined them. Everyone was nice. My main regret is there were too many people for me to manage to talk to everyone properly, or indeed anyone at any length.
A preliminary statistical analysis reveals more details on the demographic.
At least 33% are resident in the London Boroughs of Lewisham or Greenwich. At least 40% are current or former Green Party members. At least 13% have a strong Danish connection. At least 26% have a strong Irish connection. At least 26% have a strong Essex connection. At least 40% are in gemisht Jewish/non-Jewish relationships. More than I care to admit had excess facial hair. Fewer than I expected drank ale as opposed to lager.
Comments
Post-imperial England has relatively few things going for it, and proper beer is one of them. So to see you all quaffing alcoholic fizzy pop was the only disappointment of the evening.
"Mikey E"
Respec, innit!
Kettle's boiling - back in a sec.
The other odd thing was the lack of common denominators other than me. I have been to a few local bloggers' meeting - there the common denominator was obvious. I have been invited to but not attended a few leftist blogger conventions, if that's not too grand a word, where being left-wing was a common denominator. Here, the only one was reading my blog. I've been accused of being too ecumenical in my blogging, and that probably showed on Saturday.
So, the first thing people would say would be, "And where do you blog?" Then there'd be an answer, then the response would be generally an embarassedly baffled one. Blogging is by definition niche blogging, and if you sit in a different niche (e.g SE London, Jewish heavy metal...) you might not encounter the other niches. This made it interesting, too, though, and there were suprising parallels across the niches, such as the large number of free-lance workers facing financial insecurity because of the structural changes in the media, or having gone to similar schools in Essex (a county I've barely visited).
On who was most impressively witty, I'll pass on that, in my role of host.
On what we spoke about, the asterisked links above give some examples:
Kellie: "to get a hint of the atmosphere, have a read of Uncle Eddie’s post on The Philosophy Boys."
Carl: "The conversation went from the weird and apparent demise of the left in this country (Michael Ezra who blogs at Harry’s Place had much to say on this subject), print journalism, Jewish Heavy Metal music (which I at one point termed death klezmer), and the Centre for Social Cohesion, among many other things in between."
Other topics I recall: what citrus fruit should be chopped into dark rum and into campari, getting published on Comment is Free, Irish nationalists on the fascist side in the Spanish civil war, reasons for leaving the Green Party, having multiple web identities, and fans of Slavoj Zizek.
(Taking myself as an example, I know I am very shy in strange company and I can actually sit out hours of such meetings without opening my mouth even if I feel I'm going to burst. I'm pretty sure the perception I give in my blog is that of a pretty talkative person who cannot shut up.)
Trying to talk sensibly without instant access to Google was of course difficult for me, but I hope that I managed. Trying to remember the conversation next morning without a back button or history cache was even harder.
Am I included in your Danish (I used to live there) and Essex (I come from there) stats?
Noga, good question. I'm quite shy in person, especially about expressing opinions. It's interesting to hear fluent writers talk, sometimes they're just as fluent and sometimes they sound almost tongue-tied. I used to have a friend who wrote and published beautiful poems, and in person the ratio "sort of" and "like" and "kind of" and "um" to the words in between made him almost completely un-listen-able-to. So, on Saturday, no-one turned out utterly tongue-tied and incoherent, but I think that most of us (certainly including me) were at least a little less articulate in voice than on screen.
Mira, thanks for coming.