from Dave Bird A few hectic days before the demo, when some of our new stuff didn't come from the printers in time. Present were Dave, Damian, Tony, and Katie, plus Jens and Martin who rolled in at the end of lunch because of less frequent transport services. David and John arrived during the demo because of delayed trains from London, and also Neil. Hartley has flu :-( and we don't know what happened to Steve C-T. To begin with we were short of leaflets, but John had some and martin did an extra hundred at the stationers. We set up the boom-box, first with Martin and later with John on the Mic, also the cylinder for helium balloons: we have two sorts, white with a single red and blue design or transparent with the same print on each of 4 sides in blue, and we had long-float coating in for the tiny tots who kept them rather than sucked the gas. BTW someone else was doing a few, first small plain air balloons rolling along the ground which mostly burst, then a few smaller red helium balloons. What else? Weather. I wish I could say it was a nice bright spring day like Thursday, but it wasn't.

There was wind and slight rain; part of the time it was a struggle not to have the paper leaflets slowly revert to a wet pulp: I resorted to keeping a sacrificial one on the top for a few minutes to take the wet, then pulling dry ones out from under it to issue. There were a fair number of clams counter-leafleting, I don't know whether they picked up on the 11:30am posting. The clams didn't interact with us much. One guy came past me and said "are you protesting against that bunch on the second floor... well done... they conned me into there six months ago, and wouldn't let me out. I hadn't got any money, so she kept saying I'd seen now how valuable the courses were and why didn't I borrow a few hundred quid off my mother to buy them with?" By popular request I went on the Mic at the end and did a few spirited choruses of Do The ElRon-Ron, Little Ghosties, the Xemu Rap, and so forth. After that we went back down the pub for a drink and a chat until we split to catch our various trains home. All in all, it was a grand day out.