Sex, shoes, and shameless self-promotion

Well.  Here I am, my little blogilicious ones, a day or so late but what's a day or so between friends except twenty four meaningless, pointless little hours ticking away one by one?  You may have marked my absence, possibly with a small black cross on your calendar or a small, poignant note in your diary, but here I am, returned unto you my dear ones!

My absence was caused by my laptop issuing forth commands with which I could not comply.  First it dictated that I should only start it up in Safe mode - with which I reluctantly concurred, and from then on its demands became more and more extreme.  Running only Google Chrome was how it continued.  The next request was that I ran naked around a local field and from then on relations between man and machine (I really mean woman, obviously, I was only in Greenwich for three days, not nearly long enough to have gender reassignment or anything) became strained.  When I found that I could only use my laptop if I first made a sacrifice of a plate of uncooked bacon to the god of chaffinches, I considered things had gone far enough and unplugged my hard drive.

However. I am now back in all my post-conference glory (which is considerable - look - and if I turn around it's even bigger) and here to tell you all about the RNA Conference at Greenwich.

Eee, it were lovely.

For example.

This is a place near the place where we were having our conference.  I think you will agree that it looks wonderful, and I really thought I'd taken a picture of the actual place where we had our conference but now it appears that I was facing the wrong way, so you'll have to take it from me.  Wonderful.

And the people.

These are some of them.  I hasten to add that we didn't spend the whole weekend eating and drink...oh, now wait a minute...let me think... no I'm sure there were whole minutes that went past without me pushing some kind of comestible into my mouth.  During some of those minutes I attended some talks by lustrous people, such as Susanna Kearsley and Joanna Trollope.

I even did some speaking myself.

I honestly was talking here, not on the point of revealing my boobs to the assembled throng, whatever it might look like.  I was talking on behalf of the lovely Choc Lit about my hero, the equally lovely Ben Davies.  Yes, all right, Tony Robinson might have got a wee mention and a large Power Point... but mostly myself and my three equally equally lovely co-Choccers (Sue Moorcroft, Chris Stovell and Christina Courtney) were talking about our heroes.  And eating chocolate, but that was because some minutes had passed since our last meal.

So.  That was what happened.  And there was a Gala Dinner and a barbecue, and we all got glammed up (well, obviously I had to turn my inner glamour down a notch) and wore our fantastic shoes and there was considerable prancing, particularly by Kate Johnson when her heels refused to co-operate with the pavement and she had to be caught by a man.  But he was a nice man that we knew, so that was all right.

And now, my sentient ones, I must go and catch up with a week's worth of e-mails and stuff before my computer starts insisting that I make obeisance to the deity in charge of sleeping bags and overdue library fines.  Farewell!

What, you're still waiting for the sex that you were promised in the title?  Have you never heard of advertising?