It’s been a particularly hectic week, exactly the kind of thing I was trying to avoid when I planned out my travel. Obviously, things went poorly. I was trying to keep my February and March clear, but eventually signed up for The Smoke mid-February because I otherwise had nothing to do for the latter half of March. The thing I was trying to keep February and March clear for — a friend’s PhD defense — suddenly got scheduled for the Monday after the convention, notably after I had booked a hotel room in London.

There are, it turns out, no flights from London which will get you into Copenhagen at 9am on Monday. So I ended up traveling to London for the convention, then skipping the last slot and arriving in Copenhagen the night before so I could attend the defense before flying back out of Copenhagen — back through London — into New York.

This is just too much in too short a time. I’ve been bouncing around too much. I’ve packed April with a few different kinds of breaks. I think I’m gonna need them.

London’s hotels have gotten ridiculously expensive of late and they didn’t start off cheap. I had booked my room in Whitechapel¹ back in February and considered myself lucky to have gotten away with only paying £140/night. When I tried a couple weeks ago to extend it an extra day at the beginning they wanted to charge me £200 for it, and then when I tried to cancel the Sunday night they wanted to charge me an extra £40 for one less day.²

The Smoke is an small larp convention that’s been running in London for a while, featuring small-scale blackbox larps. I’m a little on the fence about it, and the current iteration isn’t any different in that regard. A lot of these conventions³ tend to have a kind of “house style” that predominates the larp listings; The Smoke for some reason features what always seemed to me to be a lot of apocalypses and a lot of explorations of queer sexuality and a lot of deconstructions of identity. And that’s all fine but none of it is really quite my bag.

That’s all fine. I mostly come to socialize with people I otherwise see rarely. But the venue for The Smoke moved this year and it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The rooms are good, but the common space is very awkward. There’s a bar, but the only food they serve are toasties. And a new organizing team decided not to organize food on Friday or Saturday nights as they had in previous years⁴ so after all the slots were finished at 8pm you were faced with staying in an uncomfortable space and socializing without food, or heading out to dinner in small groups and hoping the people you wanted to see would be back later.⁵

I think the key problem The Smoke has is deciding what kind of convention it wants to be. If it’s just a place where London larpers come in for the day and hang out a bit, it’s all probably fine. But there are increasingly international larpers bringing larps in, and if that’s the audience you’re going to need to put some more thought into catering to them. Locals can catch a crosstown bus and pack their own lunch. Nonlocals need to sort transportation and housing and food.

There’s also the question of if this is a social gathering with larps, or a larp gathering with socializing. Previous years have been a mix of both, and the space kind of facilitated that. But this space made simply hanging out difficult, and without food coming in and other larpers hanging out there wasn’t much reason to stick around after the larps were over. But if it’s just about running chamber larps then four short larps over the course of two whole days feels rather slight; not a big deal if you live across town, but harder to justify traveling large distances for.

The simplest change would be to arrange a group dinner somewhere Friday or Saturday — maybe host a party Friday night at some venue for a small charge and then order in pizza Saturday to give people a reason to hang out. A broader change would be to add more slots for larp; maybe instead of just a three and a four hour slot you could slip in a two hour slot in the mornings and showcase some shorter larps. The most radical change would be to move it somewhere else in the UK; Birmingham’s trivial to get to from London⁶ and much cheaper, but then obviously The Smoke is no longer a larp convention for Londoners. And that gets back to the trickiest of questions: what exactly are you trying to be?

I didn’t get to say goodbye to anyone at The Smoke because I had to catch an evenging flight from Gatwick.⁷ I crashed at the hotel in Copenhagen shortly after midnight, and found myself on the Metro at 8:30 the next morning heading to the University of Copenhagen.

Which is to say this was something of a pain to manage. But one of the things I’ve discovered about traveling the way I do is you become disconnected from the circle of friends you might expect to turn up at these kinds of events. And that’s made me keenly aware of other people in similar situations. My friend’s from the United States, was doing research in Copenhagen, and went to Australia for field work before getting trapped by COVID.⁸

I didn’t know if there’d be many people at their PhD defense or not, but it wasn’t all that difficult to arrange my travel through Copenhagen, even on short notice.⁹ As long as I’m in a position where I can be available to help mark these important milestones while other people aren’t, I’m going to try to.¹⁰ Especially one that involves showing up at an academic presentation then hanging out at a bar until midnight.¹¹ Otherwise, what even is the point of all this freedom?

I’m now on a flight back to London, where I will transfer to a flight to JFK, and then long past when I should have gone to bed I will be dragging my ass off to collapse somewhere in Brooklyn. Because airline pricing is stupid, the round trip price was about $400, less than the round trip price direct out of London. The return flight arrives at Heathrow and departs from Gatwick,¹² but I was planning on getting lost in London for a few days.¹³

I’ve got some family business to attend to, and then I’m heading down to the Bahamas where I’m hoping to recover from all that.¹⁴ I’m consoling myself with the fact that April will involve longer stays between travel, and maybe I’ll stop feeling like I’m pinballing all over the place.

Next: New York City (JFK) to Nassau (NAS)
Prev: Berlin to Copenhagen

Footnotes

¹ Yes, the Whitechapel you’re thinking of. There was a restaurant named “Jack the Chipper” just around the corner.

The primary draw of the location of the hotel, for me, was Brick Lane. Brick Lane’s been the heart of the city’s Bengali community for nearly a century, and the curry houses lining boths sides of the street are legendary. I’ve been working up the courage to order a phall for a while now. Maybe next time.

² I booked a room near Gatwick on the night I landed for £75.

³ e.g. Intercon

⁴ And awkwardly left the old website with the old schedule up so a number of people arrived expecting some.

⁵ And since this was in The City of London, most of the restaurants were closed on weekends.

⁶ Lord knows I’ve booked that train often enough

⁷ I had almost enough time to play the last slot before catching a train out, but I would have arrived at the airport barely 45 minutes before my flight took off which is tight on the best of days. And then Gatwick sent me an email announcing they had been cyberattacked and recommended arriving three hours early.

As is typical when you don’t need it, the trains were on time and security was light. I was at my gate with hours to spare. 45 minutes would probably have been enough.

⁸ I made multiple plans to visit over 2020 and 2021, but Australia never relaxed their travel restrictions enough for me to make it work.

⁹ Universities are well-known for hosting large numbers of expats, which is why it’s strange that they should remain so bad at accommodating them. Two weeks advance notice that your dissertation defense has been scheduled isn’t much of a hardship if you’re living right off campus, but given the realities of the present world I’d have thought you might consider the possibility that everyone involved might not be.

¹⁰ And to everyone who’s offered me an invitation to something that I had to decline, I swear I really did check my calendar and think about it. Often it just doesn’t work out.

¹¹ I am still disappointed the kebab joint we ended up at, which was otherwise great, was not the brilliantly named “Kebabistan” I noticed on the way in.

¹² On different planes, I hope.

¹³ I bought a ticket nearly 18 months ago for a Pentatonix show, mistakenly thinking it was in 2022. It’s finally come around again.

¹⁴ And then I’m flying to Canada to recover from the Bahamas. Most of my travel, it seems, is attempting to recover from the travel I’ve just done.

I’m really desperate to get that residency permit for Portugal so I can be somewhere in Europe for an extended period without feeling like there’s a countdown timer hanging over my head.