What do you get when you have 500 stress balls, the unpredictability of the Great British weather and a large park in the middle of London? A HQ devmeet of course!
In brief
500 emoticon stress balls, 10 plushies and 500 sharpie pens is a lot of stuff to carry to London from Derby, but is worth it!
Being late for breakfast means you can politely steal Heidi’s toast to have with your cup of tea.
If you arrive 10 mins late to a very large devmeet, expect a huge crowd of people already there.
Some people do dress up in full cosplay. It is fascinating. I counted 3 Dinosuar type things, a fox person, lots of hats and “ears”, at leat 2 pikachus, a Mexican wrestler, and some very short skirts!
Giving out free balls/stickers/lanyards/pens etc to lots of people makes you feel a little like a seller at a sports event! Or a primary school teacher!
People like carrot sticks, but not so much the humous
There is such thing as too many cakes.
Wind and sunshine= sunburn
Hyde Park is lovely and a great place for devmeets of large scale, but a mighty pain to get to on the underground!
Do not trust what is going on underneath picnic blankets when all you can see it 2 pairs of feet!
A lot of people have read 50 shades of grey. Few have liked it.
Walking around with a giant scarf of knitting is perfectly normal.
Signing multiple books, guitars, boxes etc makes you feel like a celebrity.
Losing almost your entire group will make you the first to arrive at Namco.
Namco is awesome.
DEVlANT will eat ribs with a napkin to try be polite.
Jetlag and no sleep will catch up on you (codenamepanther)
dxd and my boyfriend are bad at pool.
Big Ben and the London Eye don’t look half bad at 11pm but tourists will want you to take their photo.
Getting lost in the Olympic village trying to find your hotel is not fun.
You can’t go wrong with a premier inn.
Longer version
I am so glad the weekend went so well! Honestly, the weeks building up since hq announced they were invading London have been insane! It was a little like the A team trying to get a plan to come together but involving planes which means BA doesn’t behave! In this case, it was the British weather and its unpredictability, the possibility of 1000 people showing up and the police moving us, and not enough food or free stuff for all.
We had nothing to worry about.
During this week, the UK was hit by some spectacular thunderstorms, Wimbledon tennis is on which is a good sign for rain, and when we left Derby at 8am it was also drizzling with joyus drops. Yet somehow the miracle of “Baby J” (as Heidi had prayed on all week!) was upon us and we were met with glorious sunshine!
I dragged my boyfriend to his first proper devmeet. He was already coming to London to meet a friend, but when earlier in the week I had received 4 boxes from dA HQ to take to this meet. 500 stressballs, 10 plushies, 500 pens later, I recruited Synfull to take 200 balls off my hands, but in short- 500 stressballs in your living room is quite amusing!
We left Derby at 8am, and landed into a sunny St Pancras about 10am, before tubing it over to Kesington. (The Kensington area of London is nice- for those who have never been!) Joseph and I joined DEVlANT, Pixel-Spotlight, zilla774, Heidi, codenamepanther, Ayame-Kenoshi & grieves05 for breakfast, although a little late to the party! Here I had the most important and only cup of tea of my day- I think it was my survival trick for the long day!
Not only was there a purple suitcase full of balls and plushies, 8 green bags of cupcakes, various other bags of dA paraphernalia- we had 4 tired Americans to get to Hyde Park. Looming in our distance we could see the crowds of people already emerged by the Albert memorial. Holy shit there was a LOT of people there already!
If you were a passer-by, you would have wondered what the hell we were doing. Already by 12.15 there must have been about 250 deviants- that is incredible and overwhelming all in one! Ramming my purple suitcase of balls at the top, I was greeted with a lanyard and a sticker to write my name on. Avoiding the small temptation to name myself spyed (like poisonedrose did in 2009!), I scrawled my name down and gave in to the second of 2 things I don’t like wearing (1. TShirts, 2. Stickers on my boob). Group shot at the memorial was taken (version by Narfmaster above) and we trundled into the actual park.
Splitting by art form, I found myself with a group of literature people who were all quite happy to occupy themselves, which was good because I ended up giving out things instead! Balls, Lanyards, stickers, pens- you name it I seemed to have it! I have to admit, chucking balls at people who wanted them was sadly quite fun. I think everyone is happy when there is free stuff going around!
I spent most of the picnic mingling between 2-3 groups that had just camped together- best of all was finally meeting Dan-Heffer, sine-out and Elandria (who I did meet at the last HQ meet but didn’t really talk to) and showing to Dan that my face isn’t really that scary!
We took some tache tastic pictures, making use of the free dA sharpies as DEVlANT can show:
And generally there were a lot of photo takings going on:
:bigthumb311902944:
Slowly it dawned on us all that actually we were getting sunburnt in the sudden proper summer weather! Even those sensible few that did bring sunblock and used it seem to tint a little lobster pink! I personally acquired a red stripe of burn on my nose, making me look like a pregnant warrior for the rest of the day! After a tactical change of top (Tshirt swapped for flowery maternity top!), and the wind starting to freeze a few of us, it became apparent it was time to move on.
Sadly it was a group divided, but considering how many there were of us, I am not surprised! Half the group went to weatherspoons, some stayed in the park whereas the rest of us went to a place on south bank known as Namco. Despite at one point everyone waiting for me to catch them up (slow pregnant Becca can’t walk too fast!), I manage to lose all but a handful of deviants on our way to waterloo and was the first to arrive at Namco! I’m not complaining- there were plenty of seats and I was rewarded with an ice cold soda and lime!
Namco as always was awesome! Plenty of space, good food and nice atmosphere, we couldn’t really complain! I think most people were grateful for the comfy chairs! Joseph and dxd went off to have a manly pool challenge, whilst poor :devgrieve05: started drifting to sleep in a chair. One by one slowly the crowd became minimal:
Until we had the last group standing…
At 11pm, most of us had declared it was bed time and made our way to various homes and hotels in and out of London. Exhausted and finally reaching our hotel, I think Joseph and I went to bed at 1am, feeling smelly, aching and getting kicked by baby!
Overall it wasn’t the typical devmeet. These kind of meets are a rare experience, you can’t replicate a 400-strong group turning up, especially without the attraction of actual dA Staff coming along. What we do have in the UK though is regular, regular devmeets, often spanning different parts of the country where you can meet more deviants and make more friends. Do check out britain and yes those meets will have 20 people, not 400 but they are still awesome.
I know I could have spent the whole meet bending poor Heidi’s ear about the literature community, but for me yesterday was about chilling out, enjoying the sunshine and getting to know people (plus it was more fun stealing her toast!). I met some wonderful people, definitely laughed a lot and it was a long worthwhile, stress free ( nobody could be stressed, there was balls for that!) and without using an overused turn of phrase a truly “epic” devmeet.
The sad point is that due to pregnancy and getting heavier, I think this will be my last devmeet for a while, at least until after the baby is born. I am still intending to have a meet in Derby on September to celebrate the Derby Art feste, but in terms of travelling distance, I think I am done.
I have nabbed photos from other artists on here who can actually take photos, Most of these belong to Elandria and Dan-Heffer- two wonderful stock artists so please check out their galleries for more photos!
