Post-Camp, some thoughts

[pensnest]

My last sparkly Camper has gone—adelate is at the airport as I type. Beast drove her, since she had to be there for about 0830 and I don't do mornings if I have an option. It's been fun having a sparkly person around for a couple of extra days, and I learned many things, including that The Three Musketeers movie is very pretty and completely, gloriously ridiculous (Orlando Bloom has Dick Dastardly facial hair!), and that Kris Allen seems to have produced a video about gay bullying for his new single (go Kris!).

Gosport/Portsmouth was a very good place to hold Camp. Lots of tourist attractions within easy walking distance. Admittedly there is a strong naval theme to these. Beast and I went to explore HMS Warrior (first steam/sail ship, with metal armour, c 1860), then HMS Victory (Nelson's ship at Trafalgar [1805], probably built around a hundred years or so before Warrior), then the Mary Rose exhibition—Mary Rose being the ill-fated Tudor warship that sank with all hands just off Portsmouth and was exhumed a few years ago. Lots and lots of stuff found at the site—my boyfriend at university was a diver there, and his mum one of the leading lights in the recovery of the ship. It was particularly interesting to see the ships in reverse chronological order. I must have seen inside sailing ships before, but I didn't remember that the gun crews had tables and benches between the guns where they took their meals—and I certainly hadn't realised that they slung their hammocks above the tables. On the lower decks of HMS Warrior, my Beast could stand upright without threat to his skull, but aboard the Victory even I was stooping, such a great difference between the generations!

We also went with nopseud and archie_gremlin to the Explosion Museum, which is mostly about naval firepower, and the site at Priddy's Hard where the explosives were made and packaged. Interesting place, though I'd have liked more information about the lives of the people working in the factory at different times.

I was very happy that this year's Camp had quite a strong emphasis on the actual popslash. We watched a fair bit of footage, and had a good discussion on Sunday afternoon. There was also a Feast on Wednesday evening where we dressed to sparkle and had a brief war between the two dining tables, involving party poppers and miniature, glittery Tribbles. And the Five Words Story was… surprisingly sane this year. Hmm. It still amazes me that we all, as a group, get along so well, that fascinating conversations break out randomly all the time, that we have such pure *fun*.

We're refining the search criteria for Camp all the time. This year we discovered that having Interesting Things To See within walking distance is a really good idea. By the time we're all too old and grey to attend any more, we'll have refined the search to perfection, which will probably mean there's only one place in the world we can go...