On blind dates with axe-murdering Internet weirdos.

You hate travelling. You may have mentioned this before. You cope with this by overplanning. Which usually makes things far more complicated than they need to be, adding to the stress levels. Your husband B has very little truck with this and keeps dragging you off on impromptu little journeys.

Thing is, he’s been doing this for so long that he has you almost convinced. So there you were for months, havering about whether to go to the Manchester meet, and inventing increasingly complicated childcare cum travel arrangements, but really thinking that it would be highly unlikely that you would be going anywhere near your old alma mater.

The Manchester meet, you hear people asking? What’s that?

Regular readers will remember that you have almost stopped blogging due to working on first saving and now running a website called h2g2.com, a user-generated Guide to life, the universe and everything, originally set up by (among others) Douglas Adams, the writer of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Now although the point of having Internet weirdo friends is in part that you never see each other in Real Life, there has long been a tradition of ignoring this completely when it comes to this website, and this particular gathering was to be the first after the relaunch of the site since it left the BBC. Everybody, well, no, lots of people would be there. People were flying in from the USA, Sweden and the Continent even. And there you were, with the week off work, a mere five hours away.

Plus, you haven’t seen Manchester, a city you have fond memories of going to University in, for years.

So when the Saturday dawned lovely, you thought sod this for a game of tennis, laid a couple of changes of clothes, some bottles and nappies, many cardigans and coats, lots of plastic spoons, some squeaky toys, a blanket or two, a baby’s sleeping bag, some baby food, some rice cakes, your wrap, the spare pushchair and the charger for your iPhone gently in the boot, and slung the baby in the back seat and away you went.

About Oxford, you remembered just how far Manchester actually is from the cradle of civilisation.

About Birmingham, it started raining. Heavily. You crawled along the motorway at 30mph for a bit and then stopped for lunch.

On returning to the car, the Comet screamed all the way to the outskirts of Manchester.

However, from then on things started to pick up. You found the Museum of Science and Industry, which was where some of the gang were spending the afternoon, without fuss. It smells great. All hot coal and hot steam and hot iron. You found Pastey, the organiser and technical lead for the redevelopment of the site, with even less fuss. Pastey found you an umbrella, a number of other researchers, and the pub, so you could go off and meet still more people and feed your daughter.*

h2g2 meets are a curious thing. Ben, who is head of Operations, says they are like a big family wedding. And they are, excepting that the family are actually pleased to see each other rather than merely resigned and tend not to do embarrassing dancing. Oh and that researchers say ‘so who are you?’ and call each other by odd names when they find out, often excitedly. They do drink a lot though. And there are speeches. And some people wear hats, much to the Comet’s delight. Especially, Tim Stevenson, author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide: Lost Transmissions skits for h2g2′s newspaper, the Post. It was a great hat after all. Although personally you were more taken with one of the Arts Editor’s Mala’s tights. And why not? Your daughter also favours stripes.

Anyway, it was fun. Of course, going anywhere with a baby means that you always have half your brain occupied with that, and that’s all you have to say about coming second from bottom in the quiz. Of course, it also meant that you couldn’t have more than a sip of one of the specially designed gargleblasters that Pastey had persuaded the evening venue to sell. Given that sip made you cough energetically for a few minutes this was possibly a good thing. You imagine that drinking a whole glass was quite an experience. In fact, you defy anyone to ever better that recipe. The stripes! The profusion of flavours! The olive floating exactly half way up the glass! How cool is that?

It was also wonderful to see so many people there, especially the people who had travelled so far, like Community Editor, Witty Moniker and Head of Communications, Happy Nerd, both Americans. The Star likes Happy Nerd. Not enough to be held, but she was indiscriminately refusing to budge from your arms so that’s nothing. But Happy Nerd has been singing her back to sleep at 3am for months and months and months now via the wonders of Skype, so it was nice to get the rendition in person.

You like Milla, who is in charge of Testing. She taught you how to send the Star to sleep by stroking her nose, which also works on lobsters, apparently.

A number of researchers were also there. It was also good to meet BrownFurby, who has been entertaining you lately with 42 themed photos for the upcoming Podcast, Towelcast42 . You were able to put faces to names of people you’ve been chatting to for years, and the shrieks of delight may have been a bit off putting. ‘I know who you are!’ you exclaimed delightedly when you met Icotan for example, and then were too embarrassed to add what you meant which was: ‘You’re the guy who starts such interesting Ask h2g2 threads!’ Still, he took it well.

You always find it mildly amusing that at the meets you end up chatting to people who online you have only ever had minimal contact with. It’s such a big site that it is easy to ignore large sections of it and so you welcome anything that gets you out of your h2g2 niche. So since you have returned, you’ve been rifling through cartoonist Spimcoot’s back catalogues and very rewarding that has proved, especially as he is currently working on turning his Eustace series into a book.

And of course there were your old friends. The aforementioned Ben, for example, and her husband Z who started off the whole crazy plan of getting the BBC to give us the site and actually succeeded in pulling it off (he’s like that) should really should not live at the other end of the country to you in your opinion but at least you could meet them half way this time**.

But new comrades in arms were out in force too! Robbie Stamp, co-founder of the original site and co-owner of the new one made the journey, as did Brian and Aly Larholm, whose servers are hosting h2g2.com as you speak, and it amazes you that this is only the second and third times respectively you have met in person.

Last but not least (apart from all the people you haven’t mentioned because they know who they are but you appreciate that readers of the blog don’t, although they can if they would just mosey on over to h2g2 and join in), seeing fellow Guide Editor Lanzababy again was delightful given how much time you spend online together these days, even if she did jinx your car. Of course, you were in the middle of giving her an impromptu tour of the entirety of Manchester city centre’s one way system (never trust someone who hasn’t set foot in a city for 15 years when they blithely turn off the sat nav), but nevertheless to condemn you to parking problems by prompting you to say, blithely, ‘Oh I never get parking tickets’ was a bit mean. Still you have exorcised her by symbolically banning her from the car, and this seems to have done the trick. Shame about the £40 you now owe Banbury town council though. But a very nice Mancunian man came whizzing across Manchester very quickly when you phoned him to say you were locked in the carpark after the meet because you had lost your ticket and were in danger of not being able to make the hotel room your had eventually booked on the strength that you had driven past it on your way into the city earlier.

Which was very comfortable, quiet, en-suite and the cot even had a very jaunty set of clown bedclothes, which didn’t quite come close to the safari theme you endured last time you went to a B&B but was quite cheerful. And with a cooked breakfast thrown in, which was nice for the Comet who savaged toast all over their lovely carpet and mugged at all the other guests quite as if she hadn’t ladled enough charm over all the researchers she could find the night before.

So chalk up another point to your husband’s theory of travel. And for Manchester, Mancunians and for h2g2ers, all well worth the effort. And for the weather, which delivered the sort of nostalgic drenching you were expecting.

And especially to Pastey, for organising it.

*You kept the umbrella. Sorry about that, Pastey.

**Also waves at Phil and Titania. Long term online friends, fellow participants in the ten year conversation at the Atelier and readers of this blog. Hugs all round!

On a blaze of light.

The Comet is now over eight months old, which hardly seems possible. Where has the time gone?

She has certainly not been wasting it. She went from rolling to sliding abut on her tummy to pulling herself into a standing position to cruising the furniture to occasionally letting go and falling with an audible thunk of her head on the floor in no time at all. And now she has started to crawl properly and sit up on her own too!*

In fact, you think she is going though a developmental spurt. She looks round when anyone says ‘Cometuchka, smotrii’,** Babushka has this week taught her to clap her hands, in response to a particular song no less, and you and she have just started to have head shaking conversations in the middle of the night. You shake your head, she shakes hers. You shake your head back, she shakes hers. This does not get old.

Her waking up three times a night every night, however, already has.

Quite exciting also is the Comet’s graduation to actual consonants. ‘Gabamadaba,’ she says as she potters about the house, the actual sound being rather indistinct as yet. This is somewhat later than the Star managed, but she has been making excellent communicative use of growls, raspberries and, when Grandad is about, snuffles, so you are looking at it as a quirk.

After all, she looks set to walk well in advance of his record of well over one.

However, the thing that is going to win her the CUTEST BABY IN THE WORLD award is that she has started to play along with peekaboo, or cookoo as the Russians inexplicably call it.

Not only will she giggle as you hide your face behind your hands and then pull the big reveal. Not only will she look quite worried if you fail to reappear quite as quickly as she expects.*** Not only will she do this, but she will also burry her head in the cushion to hide from you, or, and this is really going for the viral youtube moment, she will manhandle a book in front of her face and duck her head down behind it, before popping up, shyly but delightedly smiling, to make sure you noticed.

*Is she supposed to be walking before she can crawl? If not, you do seem to breed pig headed children. The Star is currently going though a phase of refusing to eat anything but chicken soup. Much wailing and knashing of teeth. Yours. He is not bovered. WhatEVAH, Mama.

**’Look’ in Russian. But everybody had guessed that, right?

***The ears, which are still very big, makes this extremely funny. She looks like a concerned goblin now, albeit a concerned goblin with what looks like permanently very large blue melting eyes.

On Big Miracle.

The email mentioned whales and with that you gave up your hitherto apathetic stance to pimping your blog out for material gain and accepted the offer of taking the Star along to an advance screening of the film Big Miracle in return for a review.  The Star regards whales as honorary sharks and remains violently interested in all things marine, so despite the fact that you had vague misgivings owing to the fact that these were whales in peril, and also despite the fact that when the blurb mentioned ‘rival superpowers’ you just knew there was going to be a Russian swigging vodka in it somewhere, you decided that it was too good an opportunity to pass up and off you both trotted.

Plus, it has Drew Barrymore in it. You like Drew Barrymore.

“Will there be sharks?” said the Star on the way to the ’boutique-style’ hotel where they hold such events. “Fish? Penguins? Seahorses? Sharks? Jellyfish? Sharks? Fish? Sharks? Sharks?” and because you hadn’t actually bothered to read much beyond ‘whales’ ‘Greenpeace’ ‘Drew Barrymore’ and, yes, ‘rival superpowers’ you were confident when you said, “Oh, I should think so.”

There weren’t any sharks. Or fish or penguins or seahorses or jellyfish or even a vast amount of screen time for the actual whales either, although the one sequence of the whales swimming around under water was impressive enough to get rapturous gasps out of the Star. So if, like you, anyone is thinking of taking a budding marine biologist along to Big Miracle and then sitting back and letting the wildlife work its magic on their hyperactive toddler it is best that you burst that bubble right away.

For Big Miracle is a film not about the three whales imprisoned in the Point Barrow Alaskan ice of the frozen north sometime back in the 80s when Ronald Regan was in power that people who actually read the summary more carefully than you might think it is.

No, it is a film about the disparate group of people who come together to save them, the efforts they go to and the trials, tribulations, and incidents of getting their tongue stuck to various metal surfaces and being fleeced by a young Anouki boy they have in doing so.

It is, in fact, an ensemble rescue-adventure movie.

This is not at all a bad thing. In your opinion. Apollo 13 is one of your favourite movies for the very reason that it is the triumph of a team of engineers over adversity, and given the choice between saving Tom Hanks or three whales from certain death, you know which you’d choose. Watching all the pieces slowly and inexorably fall into place on the whales’ behalf was quite diverting.

Plus, the people involved are all quite engaging. Flawed, certainly, but generally the film was lacking in the kind of negativity that comes from being forced to watch unpleasant people being unpleasant at length. The major baddy is the weather and nearly everyone is pretty focused on trying to beat her.

You got a couple of chuckles out of it. This always pleases you.

And there may not have been much in the way of further animal action to support the three leading mammals, but there was some quite nifty  heavy machinery for the Star to drool over.

The problem is that there was quite a lot of back story to fit in, as well as attempts to tackle the themes of ethics in journalism, the tension between environmental protection and a native people’s traditional way of life, Cold War politics, coming of age, the generation gap, the evils of the oil industry, serving in the armed forces and luuuurve. Towards the middle of the film you started to feel as though huge swathes of the original script had been ruthlessly excised in order to bring the film in in anything like a reasonable length. In one instance, for example, an entire romance sweeps by in the space of one phone call. It’s rather a shame. You would have almost sat through the seventeen hour version.

Which brings us to the other problem. Being a film about humans and human motivations, it involves quite long periods of talking, talking, talking at times, so it does have to be said that in the second third of the film the Star did wander off to look for more of the sweeties kindly provided by the organisers for a while. Much business with his whale-shaped balloon and trying to chat to the people next to and behind us.

He resisted your suggestion that you leave altogether, however, and when the rescue efforts ratcheted up towards the final push, he was duly enthralled again, and remained so until the end. It helped the whales come back into focus then too.

A final word of warning. The ending of the film is not quite what might be expected from a heartwarming family-friendly movie about saving cute animals. Possibly the filmmakers were constrained by it being based on a real life event.

That said, this plot twist went right over the Star’s head and he left well content with his experience overall. He was certainly able to go home and give a fair summary of the main points of the plot to his Papa and pronounce it good quite decidedly. Really, that’s everything you can ask of a film experience with a toddler.

As for you, you like to cry in movies. You pronounce it good too.

Although the Russians? Did neck the vodka.