Well, damn, it is Sunday already. How fast the weekends go by!

This morning was a repeat of yesterday: up at eight, dressed, dog walk, sandwich out of the fridge, and then driving off to breakfast. Had great service from Yolanda once again and wrote a little positive note for her on my receipt.

The first panel was "Holmes Through the Years": from William Gillette all the way down to the amateur web series like S(her)lock. We discussed the well-known (Rathbone, Brett, Cumberbatch, Miller) and the not-so-well known (Nicholas Rowe, the two Russian Holmeses, etc.) and played a nice game of Six Degrees of Sherlock Holmes with one actor connected to another. One of the panelists, Kathleen, used to go to Williamstown, and got to see Frank Langella do Sherlock Holmes there! Oh, be still, my beating heart!

The next panel was the Baker Street Babes' live podcast, which was an interview of the convention guest, David Nellist (Stamford in Sherlock). He was a great and genial interviewee who told a funny story about how someone tweeted with excitement because they had seen him at breakfast. His daughter wondered what was so great about that; she saw Daddy every morning at breakfast! :-) The inevitable question arose: what Shakespeare would you like to do? King Lear. (Or at least Lear's fool.)

I remained in the room for the Writing Dilemmas panel. This was supposed to be a roundtable discussion, but instead it was the panel of both fanfiction and published authoris just sharing writing advice with the  audience. I thought it went pretty well. The biggest advice as always: just write! Don't doubt, just keep going. Maybe the story will turn out bad, but you will have learned something from writing it: how not to do it. Lots of recommendations for Scrivener...oh, should I?

I'd intended to go to the Pastiche panel, but instead I did another turn around the dealer's room, bought the book The Unlikely Death (a science fiction version of a Holmes mystery taking place in space where a dead Holmes solves his own murder through a still living John Watson) and a cute postcard "221BB8," yes, BB8 dressed as Sherlock Holmes. It's adorable; I couldn't resist. Then I went to sit in the computer center and ate my chicken salad sandwich, drank my juice, and read "Consumer Reports" until the next panel, which was basically "what little we know about Sherlock, season four." We don't even have the usual three words from Mark Gatiss or Steven Moffat that are always clues to the upcoming episodes this year, just that the season will be about "revelations" (and, the panelists suspected, "consequences"). Apparently there was also a one-day casting call for a newborn baby for a "popular drama" just about the time Sherlock began to film, so suspicions are rife that John and Mary are parents. Also some theories that there will be a death this season, and guesses that it will be Mycroft so that Sherlock can fulfill his destiny.

And finally the always-popular (at this convention, anyway) Cabin Pressure panel. Since the series is now over, most of the discussion was about what people think happened to the characters after the ending. And do they ever have another Burling Day?

All good things come to an end, which means the final panel is "Our Last Bow," the convention wrap-up. I put in a good word for Yolanda (to which several people piped up), inappropriate room sizes were discussed, the lower attendance was explained (real life interfering in some of the regular attendees' plans), and we finally took a group selfie (can there be such an animal?), and it was over.

Came home to a nice supper of Sprouts' Italian wedding soup, with a yummy Florentine from Bernhard's Bakery for dessert, and then an even better dessert with the season premiere of Call the Midwife. Trixie is working through alcoholism with exercise, Patsy almost loses Delia again (but doesn't thanks to Sister Julienne), and in a three-handkerchief plotline, the first of the Thalidomide babies are born, with her father initially rejecting her. I know how it was back then, when handicapped children were born, and couldn't see the father as a monster, but oh, how it hurt seeing him against a poor little child whose only "crime" were flippers for hands and feet. This is going to be a continuing storyline this season for Dr. Turner and, knowing how he cares about his patients, it will be devastating for him knowing he gave them the very drugs that caused the deformities.

Labels: conventions, food, television

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