Pete Ashton’s Blog

It’s funny how context affects behaviour, as rapidly apparent at last weekend’s big comics convention/festival/gathering/whatever in Bristol. I’ve been going to these things in their various incarnations regularly since 1989 and it’s got to the stage where there are things I do and ways I behave that only ever occur in this environment, specifically the consumption of alcohol.

My friends from London may find this hard to believe but I don’t actually drink that much these days. Generally I’ll go out on the piss once a month but never midweek and never at home. In fact there’s been a can of beer in the fridge since November which it never occurs to me to drink (Sam’s tee-total in case you were wondering). Partly my new-found sobriety is financially driven and there’s the little factor of not having regular work-chums to dive into the pub after work with, but I also just don’t need to release my tensions with a few beers any more. Whatever the reasons I’m quite the sober bunny these days.

Except at comics conventions.

On Saturday I arrived with Matt Broersma at about noon and entered the bustling hall and a wave of familiarity and anticipation wafted over me. I wasn’t particularly excited but neither did I feel particularly comfortable. These things can be a bit intense in a good way and I was braced for a rather manic weekend. I decided to take a quick tour of the small press tables, see who was there and what they’d got to offer, before settling down to some serious conversationalising. Half an hour later it struck me what was wrong. I was sober. Bear in mind it was lunch time and I’d only eaten a bowl of muesli for breakfast. I never drink during the day. I now needed a beer. Luckily I bumped into John, one of the Brum pub meet lot who I hadn’t seen for yonks, so we trundled down to the pub for a pint. On returning I felt much better and proceeded to work my way through the hall spending a relatively frightening amount of cash on self published comics because, well, I had a lot to catch up with and the general quality level was high.

More pubbing and chatting followed and eventually a group of us bundled along to Here, a great little arty/ziney shop (see my post on BugPowder for more) who were having an open evening to introduce conventioneers to their wonderful enterprise. After a couple of hours browsing and chatting I realised it was getting close to 10pm. The hotel bar would be hotting up. I had to go. Mardou asked why, since the party was still going on at Here, which was true, and I’d have liked to have stayed, but… It’s tradition! I have to go to the hotel bar and drink lots of beer until the sun rises and then I must stagger around the next day with the hangover! It’s always been this way and it always will be this way! She didn’t seem all that convinced, and to be honest neither was I but off I went to the strange universe that is the hotel bar. Different rules are in play and I must follow them.

The next day I didn’t have too bad a hangover but things were definitely pretty darn fuzzy when the other demonstration of how context is all happened. I was crouching down on the floor with an “ooh, that’s a good idea” cup of tea when a voice said “Are you Pete Ashton?” This happens to me quite a lot at these events, thanks to a decade of small press shenanigans, so I looked up to be greeted by Darren of LinkMachineGo. Which was great! But totally out of context! LMG was one of the first blogs I ever saw back in 2000 and I started blogging soon after and while we’d communicated sporadically we’d never actually met. Until now. At a bloody comics convention. No-one from outside my little comics world is supposed to be here and I’m totally thrown. And hungover. As we’re stumbling through a conversation (I’m stumbling, Darren’s conversing) chum John walks up. I introduce Darren to him. He’s never heard of LMG. In the blogging world everyone’s heard on LMG. If LMG was a comic everyone would have heard of it here. In the real world LMG is obscure but this isn’t the real world. This is an event analogous to a world where LMG is well known, so it feels like LMG should be well known here even though it won’t be. My head starts to hurt a bit more.

Note: must actually have a proper sit-down conversation with Darren at some point far away from the world of comics.

Oh, and lots of other things happened over the weekend and lots of interesting ideas and thoughts found themselves forming in my head, so it wasn’t just a big piss up. That’s not to say it wasn’t a big piss up. Of course it was a big piss up. It was a comics convention. That’s how these things work.