"It isn't just me."

Talis says it best. As she so often does. Those four little words...well, certainly to fans of my generation and earlier, at some point in our lives, those words have burst across the skyline of our minds like multicoloured lightning. It isn't just me. I'm not alone. That sentiment is behind all the conventions, the zines, the filk albums, the costume displays, the whole glorious circus that is fandom. Even the leather-clad old guard propping up the bar moaning about how it was all so much cooler before all these people showed up...even they are, in their own way, expressing that joyful discovery, that good news from beyond the stars. It isn't just me.

Emerging, or rather starting very gradually to emerge, from five days and counting of one of the stinkiest colds I think I have ever had, it occurs to me that what I have told you about the recent filkcon amounts to "I had a great time" in the middle of a huge and unfair gripe about something quite unrelated. This is a shocking disservice to what was a brilliant convention, well-run and well-supplied with fantastic performers and me, and a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. I can only apologise and plead ill health.

So, highlights as well as I can recall them. One was eintx's set, which always seems to be early on Friday evening (when she has one at all) and which consequently I have never been able to attend till now. She prefers to sing in German, so most of her songs were in that language, but I thought I detected a theme running through her choices, about the passage of time, growing up and growing old, and what stays with you and what gets left behind. I may have missed the point completely, of course. At any rate, it was an exquisite little set performed with subtle and assured charm, and the lady's voice is unique and beautiful.

Sadly I had to miss a chunk of tig_b's set, or rather the set in which she assisted her travelling companion Beaker, due to dropping off two boxes of Mershane books at the dealer's room (we sold six!) but I enjoyed what I heard very much. And then there was Christo. My gods, that man. A performer's performer if ever there was one, musical and comedic polymath--it cries out to heaven for justice that radio and television are choked to bursting with soulless manufactured mechanical iterations of tired seventies fads, while real talent and skill like his contents itself with gladdening the hearts of a hundred people in a small hotel. I'm just very happy to be one of the hundred, of course, but when I think how just a tiny injection of Christoness could revitalise the pop music scene...dammit he deserves to be better known. That's all.

And, since we were both too tired for circles, and from what I could see so was just about everybody else, that was it for Friday. More later.