Blimey, but I make a meal of these writeups. Will try and hurry things along.

Up bright and early to the sort of cooked breakfast that seemed mostly made by people to whom cooking isn't their first language, save for the mushrooms, which were so remarkably good that I can only assume there was one ancient Zen mushroom savant on the kitchen staff. Panel at 10am — "Sufficiently advanced magic" (Marcus Gipps of Gollancz moderating Stephen Deas, Juliet E McKenna, Chris Wooding, Shana Worthing and me) — lots of different viewpoints from people whose worlds had more or less tech, and very different types of magic. Mention of David Brin's The Practice Effect and Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn. Juliett and I are both going similar places with our fiction — she's just finished a cycle of books involving social revolution and the overthrow of a feudal/monarchic system, for example. This clashed with what sounded like a very interesting panel on AI chaired by Paul Cornell.

After that, caught "How Pseudo do you like your Medieval" (Anne C Perry, Jacey Bedford, Anne Lyle, Juliet McKenna (1) and George RR Martin), discussing history and fantasy, followed by another (with, for bonus points, Juliet McKenna and Paul Cornell) on gender parity in convention panels. After that I was able to badger Bella Pagan of Tor into springing for lunch. I made the Wild Cards panel, with Mr Martin introducing two of the newest writers to be invited into the world's longest-running shared world (David Anthony Durham and Paul Cornell) and eventually ended up signing some books, some programmes and an enormous polystyrene monkey.  That evening was the fan party of the Brotherhood Without Banners, Mr M's followers, into which I snuck alongside Joe Abercrombie, Sarah Pinborough and David Durham, and at which a third instance of general [3] fail (see last post) occurred. I did draw some raffle tickets though.

(1) Who was giving Paul Cornell a run for his money in the ubiquity stakes.