Boring

A few weeks ago the ticketing company called Eventbrite (reference 1) sent me an advertisement for something called the Boring Conference, the ninth such, to be held in the Conway Hall. A conference about things like trolleys, pantographs on Southwestern Trains and the printing of the tickets for events at the Festival Hall. Just up my street I thought, and so we went off to the Conway Hall last Saturday. An event (reference 2) invented and curated by one James Ward.

Boring start

The frost which had been advertised had not arrived, but it was a cold and windy morning. And it struck me that the texture of the framework of the platform shelter might possibly provide the theme for a short talk at some future conference.

Bus from Waterloo to Holborn and from there to Red Lion Square where we took tea in the rather windswept café in the gardens there. A  place which probably did good business during the week but which was quiet enough at 1015 on a Saturday. Perhaps his lease said he had to do seven days a week.

Conway art

Conway heritage

I was reminded what a pleasantly old-fashioned place Conway Hall was. A relic from the first part of the twentieth century, a relic that appeared to be alive and reasonably well. One was reminded of a village hall or the assembly rooms in a provincial town. Probably a lot cheaper than a more modern venue. See reference 3 for previous visits, four years or so ago now.

To set the tone, the back of our right hand was rather clumsily stamped in red on entry, after which we collected our goodies bag, mainly containing a few cheap sweets.

House full with a very mixed audience, mainly young. The sort of slightly odd crowd you might see at a real ale bash or a jazz festival. All very good humoured.

YouGov

It turned out that the organiser, James Ward, was a very funny speaker in a rather amateurish sort of way. Perhaps that was part of why he was so funny. Mainly he told us about how much he disliked tomato ketchup, giving us various odd gobbets of information about Heinz and ketchup on the way. He also told us that YouGov was a wonderful source of useless information.

Next up we had someone put at a desk on the other side of the stage from the speakers, from where he would conduct a live Twitter session throughout the proceedings. I have no idea how this went, but nearly everybody had a telephone and I suppose a good part of the audience was Twitter competent. No doubt one could peer at the Twitter website to find out.

The second speaker, Rachel Wheeley had been a radio producer for BBC and was now some sort of a comedienne. She gave us a very funny talk about the finer points of the time signal you get before some BBC radio programmes. She has something about towels and hitch-hikers coming up in a one day festival in Cambridge.

The third speaker was a young lady called Cerys Bradley doing a spoof on solemn science on the hypothesis that big gay happenings were strongly correlated with extreme weather events. Or something along those lines. Not too bad, but I think I could have done a much better job on her script and visuals than she had.

Box certificate

Then we had a chap who told us about collecting postcards about Battersea Park. And about the comic train they had there during the Festival of Britain. Then a lady who collected things called box certificates, to be found on most cardboard boxes coming from the US and certain other places. Then a chap who took a photograph of the pavement every 10 minutes while walking the ley line between Tothill Mound and Hampstead Heath, or some such thing. All good ideas for an event of this sort, but not very well executed. They could all have made better use of their material. In fact they all suffered from my problem when giving talks: too much material and not enough delivery.

Victoria House

That took us to the lunch break and we decided to call it a day. We had had our money's worth and took a bus down to the south bank and the Archduke. Stopping on the way to snap the once grand Victoria House, once an insurance factory, now broken down for a number of smaller concerns. Sic transit gloria mundi. See reference 6.

Pecan pie with double cream and Calvados

Service at the Archduke was a bit slow, but we had a good time. Ham hock terrine good. Half chicken good. Taken, I think, with a satisfactory Gavi di Gavi. Pecan pie for dessert tasted a lot better than it looked. The chocolate dribbles were superfluous, but, curiously, the heavy cream did cut the sweetness in a helpful way. Also helped along by a couple of two year old babies being cute. And a party of rather highly dressed young ladies from Washington DC, out on a birthday bash. I was able to impress them with my knowledge of the run down H street from the botanic gardens (aka United States National Arboretum) to the railway station. I did not tell them that I chickened out of going into a bar in said H street and waited until I was nearer the centre of town. While they thought it odd that I had been unable to find one, the street being full of them.

Service road at Raynes Park

Not impressed that the Chessington train which did the first leg to Raynes Park was still on winter time. Nor that the platform library at Raynes Park had not been restocked since the night before. Consoled myself with trying to work out how the service road coming out from under the Epsom platform worked.

A good day out. But I would be surprised if we go to Boring X.

H Street

PS 1: taking a quick peek at H Street on gmaps, it does not look very familiar. Either I have got in a muddle, or they have been cleaning the place up in the fifteen years or more since I was there.

PS 2: I might say that Eventbrite is a useful source of outings, sending out a weekly list of events it thinks that I might like.

Reference 1: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://boringconference.com/.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=conway. Excluding the post about John Conway.

Reference 4: https://rachelwheeley.com/.

Reference 5: https://www.cerysbradley.com/. 'Cerys is a PhD student in the Crime and Security Science Department at UCL. They study the people who buy drugs on the internet and the efficacy of law enforcement attempts to stop them. In [her] spare time, [she is] a comedian, a podcast producer, editor and presenter, and freelance science communicator'. What?

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_House,_London.