Colin Harvey – author

With the onset of spring, so ends the long winter hibernation of the SMOF (Secret Masters of Fandom) community, at least those who haven’t gone South to Florida. Although from what I’ve heard of the weather in Florida this year, hibernation might have been preferable.

But now they’re waking up, and so the con season begins, with Microcon in the UK, and P-Con 7 in Ireland. I’ll be going to this one. More tomorrow or Thursday.

It was a weird experience watching the men’s hockey final on the BBC.

(Ice) Hockey is a sport that’s largely ignored over here, except when the Olympics are taking place, even more than football is in the USA. I’ve been told that live Premiership matches are available in the US, so Britain’s attitude is more parochial than the North American one, since all we can get is the odd match at 4am on Channel 5.

Our own association goes back almost two decades to the last time someone had a go at organizing a pro hockey league in Britain. A few months before we were due to visit relatives in Vancouver, we learned that Bristol had a team. We went to watch them play and fell in love with the game, especially as we could drink with the players afterwards, and learned that one of them had a brother playing in Canada for the Vancouver Canucks. Many good evenings followed, often leading to major hangovers the next day…

Unfortunately the Bristol Bulldogs were wound up a few months later in one of those political shenanigens that bedevil organized sport from time to time. But by then we’d visited Vancouver and fallen in love with the place. And when we were over in BC in time for the Stanley Cup Final the next year, and the Canucks were in it, we were sold. Sadly, so were all the tickets.

So we had to make do with watching it on TV while we were over there; in fact it became almost obligatory for us to settle down with a match on the box, and the mere mention of ‘It’s hockey night in Canada’ still brings up goosebumps. The Canucks haven’t made the final since losing to the New York Rangers, and ever since then trying to follow them has been a bit like supporting Bristol City. They always promise much, then fade away…

After the all the preamble and pontificating by the talking heads on the panel, big matches like last night’s are usually anticlimatic. But not this one. Oh no…

Today’s scheduled –as opposed to the unscheduled venture into theatre criticism yesterday- is the latest issue of Black Static.  It’s here.

…comes the reckoning, as I wrote over at suite101.

I woke up this morning feeling as if I’d somehow committed some terrible sin by having a few nights out. I must work on suppressing this Calvinism that overtakes me from time to time. But only after I’ve written a review…

Want to know really useful stuff, like the plural of mongoose and the boiling point of money? Click here.

This morning’s post on Suite101 is full of joy and tears and awkward questions. More here.

Those of you awake and sober may have noticed an abrupt cessation of blogging about this time last week, and then an equally abrupt resumption, sans explanation. Which makes it sound far more mysterious than it actually is, as this post at Suite explains….

I promised some stats and stuff over at Blog101, so here‘s the post. We’ll see how much (or little, more like) I know.

I’ve posted this week’s review later than I’d like, but Asimov’s for March is reviewed over at Suite101

I promised this morning’s ramble would be on Life Writing, so I’ve posted a few (almost) random thoughts at Suite101.