It’s the news that at least some of you have been waiting for….the winner of the LolliBop competition. And this time, to stop the winners name annoyingly appearing in the preview text, I’m going to tell you what we’re up to today. We’re off to London Film and ComicCon, with (of course) a toddler. And some spare geeks. I’m exhibiting there, with tvandfilmreview.com and may even get to meet some celebs…by sci-fi standards anyway. We’re leaving Roo with his beloved “Auntie Sabbage” but taking Eva. I’ll come back and edit this post later to let you know how that went.

But enough suspense. Using the power vested in me by LolliBop and random.org, I am happy to announce that the winner is…..

Nic Horne!!

Congratulations Nic, we will be in touch soon 🙂
And now off to geekfest…..

The fact that it’s taken me half a week to update this post shows just how knacked I was after 9 hours of wall-to-wall geek. As with most things in life, it would have been easier without Eva, but we managed just fine. The never-ending supply of biscuits on our stall helped, and Nathan bringing her in 3 hours after I got there certainly helped.

If you’re thinking about going to a comic convention with small children, take heart – lots of other people have the same idea. There were loads of kids there and, to my shame, most of them were dressed up (we had an outfit planned for Eva but it was too darn hot to go through with it. Didn’t stop the people in PVC catsuits or full stormtrooper outfits). There was our stalls, giving away free sweets and toys but most of them were full of breakable, collectable things. So it would have been a bit of a nightmare taking Reuben (“I want zat giant Iron Man!”). It also got crazily busy around lunchtime, and there was no space to run about. This gives you an idea of how packed it was:

At this point, I had retreated upstairs to the canteen with my spare geeks, and we luckily managed to bag a table (it was bang on1 2:00). So, Eva could both eat something and stretch her tiny legs. But downstairs, she was firmly wrapped most of the time, except when I let her out to run around in the gap behind our stall. As I interviewed some  vintage Dr Who actors, she had to be hauled away fussing. By 3ish, she was a bit over it all so we went for a mango smoothie at Crussssh before a final push on the stall. But she did well, considering.

So, if you’re considering ComicCon with a toddler, make it reasonably snappy, build in lots of breaks, don’t try and interview anyone unless you have back-up and take infinite quantities of biscuits with you. Oh, and dress them up as a Jawa…