I accidentally networked.

Having just reread my last post (and wow, that was from a long time back. Bad me), I am almost ashamed to admit how I have spent my weekend.

I networked.

I know. I know. How could I? After everything I said about networking.

Never fear, it was less power-talks and secret handshakes and more tumbling into a narrow little pub in Oxford, falling into chairs and taking part in a writing exercise which had us shouting at each other in pairs.

I am now far more self aware. The first thing of which I am now aware is that I am absolutely awful at working out beforehand what people will look like. It's not that I spent much (or any, really) time pondering this, but part of me was expecting people to look like their avatars. They didn't. Not one person in there was a cacti or a sunny beach or a boat.

At this point, I should perhaps point out that I had never met most of these people before, even though I have shared writing and random conversations and advice with many of them. We normally meet up in cyber space and this was the first time many of us had met.

I understand it was less nerve-wracking for me, even with my general confusion over how to speak to humans, as I had turned up with Jules. People seemed to work out pretty quickly that Jules and I have known each other for a good long while. We give it away somehow. Others had arrived alone and had to go through the process of working out which bunch of strangers might be the writers. More power to them. Jules and I had spotted one person at the bar and were half decided on sneaking behind him until we worked out who was with our group and we had each other as back-up. We had just decided on Skyrim style sneaking when we were spotted by someone we met back at the Writers' Festival in York last year.

In any case, it was perhaps a good thing that no-one was a boat, as the restaurant we went to was...snug. I am not used to sitting hip-to-hip with people I have just met in person, whilst I try to wrestle chicken and chips off a plate without being able to move my elbows, but it went surprisingly well. It would have gone less well had I needed to rub elbows with a ship, I feel.

Thank-you for not really being a ship, Matt.

The meal itself was wonderful, with warmth and chat and wine...which may have assisted the first two items on the list. And a special mention must go to Tray Guy. Our waiter. It is a noble profession. He dealt well with a starter being ordered for pudding (something I have longed to do for years and now I have seen someone do it. She is a hero, that woman. Next time I want more ribs and people say 'No' and 'You can't eat ribs for pudding', and I going to ignore them and eat ribs.), didn't flinch (much) when he asked who wanted the wine, all innocent of the fact he was asking a bunch of writers, and nearly got hit in the face with raised hands, and heard every pronunciation of 'poulet' possible. Everyone raise a glass to Tray Guy. May he not need too much therapy to get over that meal.

Other people also turned out not to be ships and pieces of landscape. They all also had actual people names, something I suppose I knew in theory, and the afternoon and evening was full of people telling each other real names and then promptly going back to user-names in the next half of the sentence.

Using the Eagle and Child as our meeting point meant being in a pub about as wide as my living room and seeing Tolkien and C.S.Lewis references all over the place, so that was a plus. I was tormented throughout our time there by a door labelled 'Narnia', through which no-one stepped. Someone who looked much more like a 3D human than I had expected told me that the sign was a lie, but I suspect I was just being kept out of Narnia.

Clearly, the pub became our home base, as we ended up back there after the meal. By this point, people had mostly gone home (by which I mean most people had gone home, not that everyone had partly gone home, leaving only a portion of themselves in the place) and Jules and I soon realised that the dim lighting was actually our eyelids trying to close, so we went off to find a bus. Happily, the bus we got on took us in the general direction of our hotel.

All in all, it was a great day and I would wax lyrical about everyone I spoke to, but I am filled to the brim with confusion over whether to use people names or usernames, so I will simply say that I am looking forwards to meeting up with everyone again.