No, we’ve not been to a dodgy strip club; instead, yesterday saw me taking K to his first ever blogmeet, at a formerly gay (and now much improved) pub on the Bayswater Road. Waggledance was their guest beer – and at a whopping 5%, it was a fine ale indeed – but since K was going to have to be driving us home from Derby station that evening, shandies were the order of the day. I’m sure you can picture the amusement.
Perhaps I shouldn’t even be calling the blogmeet a blogmeet, since it wasn’t an openly publicised event. Rather it was a gathering of The British Blogpals Of Lucy Pepper From Portugal – who, amongst her many more celebrated achievements, is also responsible for the first two images at the top of my sidebar.
Most of the blogpals were familiar faces; others I was meeting for the first time. K had never met any of them before, and he doesn’t read blogs anyway, so I did a certain amount of discreet “background” hissing – but it wasn’t an easy social situation for him to step into, and he did well to last the course with such good grace. (Tellingly, he formed an immediate alliance with Lucy’s Professor, one of the two other non-bloggers in the room.) Perhaps I should have dragged him round the table with me, showing him off and making sure that EVERYONE LOVED HIM. But that’s not our style. So I was rather pleased when Bob (hooray, another Gay at a Blogmeet for once!) took me aside and told me that K was “lovely”. Because, well, he IS. And it always pleases me when people agree.
(I always operate on the default assumption that everybody who meets K is madly jealous that I got in there before they did. Yes, I might be delusional. But at least my delusions are romantic ones.)
(Example: the nice older lady on reception at our hairdressers, who didn’t realise that we were partners until it came out in passing a couple of months ago:
Nice older lady (with feeling): I love him.
Mike: So do I. But I saw him first.
Our hairdresser: Yeah, but she had him last.
You have never seen two people rouge up quite so swiftly. But I over-parenthesise.)
As for me, the usual phenomenon occurred, whereby I left the pub feeling I hadn’t spent nearly long enough talking to people, even though I had been there for over five hours solid. How does that happen?
We would have packed swatches (see posts below; way to fill a comments box; updates as we get them), but they’d never have fitted in the day sack.
I am very tempted to give you neatly turned pencil portraits of the bloggers I’d never met before, but perhaps discretion is the better part of valour.
I had one Waggledance too many, and ended up burbling. But that’s all part of the experience.
Mike loves meeting bloggers!
troubled diva 