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Blake's 7 - a walk down memory lane.
Jun. 6th, 2026 04:20 pm Between the "30 days of Blake's 7" meme I was doing on DreamWidth and the subsequent outbreak of fanfic (currently about 10,000 words and end in sight), I have been somewhat immersed in Blake's 7 even before I went to do a bit of research on Hermit for said fanfic this morning and wandered off into the con reports. This probably explains why when I went to Co-Op this afternoon and their in-house radio started playing The Beautiful South's "Don't marry her, have me", I was immediately taken back to the first time I heard that song - as a Blake's 7 filk at Redemption 99. It was very funny then, and having just looked it up on the con reports page it's still funny now.
I've been feeling rather melancholy the last few weeks. February or March marked 30 years since I went to my first con. It was Neutral Zone in Newcastle, a multimedia con by the local Star Trek fan group, and I went because Gareth Thomas was a guest. I had a lot of fun, so I went to another one, the first Discworld con. And then the last Who's 7, and since then I've gone to at least one con every year.
I wrote B7 con reports and theatre trip reports back then. _Detailed_ reports. And I'm so glad I did, because although I wrote them for other fans who couldn't be there, now they're for me. 20, 25, 30 years on, I can read them and be taken back to that time when we were all young. All the people I met and made friends with.
Fannish networks change and we lose contact. We move on, from Usenet and mailing lists to LiveJournal and Twitter, and Tumbler, to other fandoms, and, and... People drift away, and sadly some of them have died now. It's ten years since Gareth died, eleven since we lost Pterry. But I still have online links with so many of those friends of long ago, and if there is ever another Redemption I will be there.
