A long, long time ago at a Worldcon far away I joined a group called Octarine. I enjoyed their humorous magazine full of anarchic humour, and one day I fell prey to their desire to run a convention of their own. I believed that I was signing on to provide help on the day, as a gopher perhaps. It seemed odd that they wanted me to attend so many meetings in the two year run-up, and by the end of the first meeting I became aware that I was actually on the committee of Inconsequential. We had a ton of fun. Friendships were forged and broken. Hotels went into receivership, and hid our members in a room whilst they showed wedding parties around. The hotel midnight chip butty was born. And Simon the interim hotel manager was found to be a god. Three amazing conventions later I took a backwards step at just the right moment, fell off the juggernaut that had become Incons I, II and III, and became a dim shadowy background figure occasionally appearing in fannish musicals, or sitting outside the dealer room demanding drinks with menaces. Many years passed. The world moved on and I was forgotten, a mere footnote from a mythical time of inconceivable fun. Some inconsistent fossickers unearthed me, blew the sand out of my ears and reanimated me, making me better, faster, stronger than a thousand angry wasps. I have yet to learn what that means, but I suspect there’ll be quite a buzz about it.
