So I planned to go to this MCM Expo thingy today. I hear it’s a bit like the Peterborough Sci-Fi and Fantasy Fair, except without the great 15+ year-old poster of wizards and spacemen.
However, really I didn’t have much motivation for the shindig. The one earlier this year had Troma honcho Lloyd Kaufman attending and that one I’d have gone to had real life not interfered. Of this weekend’s guests only Dougie Braithwaite meant anything to me and he’d pulled out. So I was half heartedly dragging my ass to London. At least I’d get a change of scenery, some exercise and pick up a couple of manga volumes I thought.
Well I got to London and it hit me in the face this thing was on the wrong side of town for an easy trip. Especially as part of the Circle line was closed. I figured I’d get on the Central and go across town that way. Only Holborn had been evacuated, so I had to abandon that trip part way through. At this point I gave up on the whole Expo idea and got off at Oxford Circus and wandered along Oxford Street to Forbidden Planet and Gosh!
On the way I saw a man carrying a ferret. The ferret was wearing a high visibility lead. This suggests that the man has on occasion walked said ferret at night. Or it’s a professional ferret used for vermin control. I hope it was the latter, and it wasn’t an deliberately eccentric pet.
I picked up Monster Volume 10 but there wasn’t a Golgo 13 Volume 11 in sight. I grabbed a bite to eat, then figured I’d see about swinging by the Expo and seeing if I saw any faces I knew. So I got there mid afternoon, wandered around the ExCel centre for a bit, decided I wasn’t going to pay (especially as I was going to be charged to take money out) just to feel even more cynical and old than I was feeling already (the sight of Naruto headbands will do that to a man), took some photos of derelict riverside buildings and headed back.
So my Expo experience was all of 15 minutes!
So it was a lot like Peterborough Sci-Fi and Fantasy Fair, except without people I know dressed as vikings and hitting each other with real swords. And I bet there wasn’t LARPers trying to sell VHS copies of their own homemade Stargate film!