I’m barely in the United Kingdom. I’ve had two days — two nights, really — and then I’m off somewhere else. I signed up for a larp last minute, so I didn’t have much time between landing here and flying off to Norway. And, you know, I’m beat. I was in the US just long enough to get jetlagged flying back here, and I’ll be back here after Norway, before I head to Portugal,¹ so I just booked a hotel near Stansted and caught the bus here from Heathrow.²

I’ve spoken before about how much I appreciate airport hotels as a place to recharge. They solve a lot of problems. Flight leaving too early in the morning? You’re already at the airport. It’s a multiple-hour journey to get there? Leave the day before so you don’t have to stress about travel delays. Feeling ill or jetlagged or burnt out? Take a day or two off from touring³ and lock yourself in a comfy room where the most taxing question you’ll face is whether you’ll make the 10am cutoff for breakfast.

As usual, there’s a balancing act here. Sometimes I’m just looking for a cheap place to crash. But sometimes — like these days — I’m looking for something a little fancier: a nice pool, a sauna in the gym, maybe a swanky bar or a spa. The hotel I’m in right now is kind of midrange. It claims to be four-star but it’s really three-star. But when I just wanted to drop out of the world and watch bad movies⁴ before I fly to Oslo tomorrow, it did the trick.

I had signed up for the larp Allegiance way back when they opened in February. It’s a spy larp set in 1970 at the height of the Cold War, more John le Carré than Ian Fleming, and that sounds exactly like my kind of catnip.⁵ But, alas, I didn’t get in.

I left the dates penciled in and kind of forgot about it, figuring I’d have a reasonable shot getting in off the waiting list. And I had mostly given up that hope about a month ago, when I still hadn’t heard anything.⁶ So when I discovered I wasn’t going to be staying in the United States longer than planned, I reached out one last time to the organizers to mention I still had time in my schedule. Whether that spurred something or not, two days later I got an invite.

Had I more time, I would have done some research and prepped. As it is, I have an incredibly cheap suit from Goodwill⁷ and a ticket to Oslo. It’ll be fine. We’re larpers. We literally make this shit up as we go.

I was especially motivated to accept because for some reason virtually all larps are seeing a huge upswing in cancellations.⁸ I know most people don’t have any choice in the matter: can’t get time off work, or finances aren’t what they were six months ago, or family emergencies mean you can’t be there.⁹

But is 2022 really that much more turbulent than 2019 was, in that regard? It sure feels like something changed. And while you may understand it’s not personal as a larp designer, it sure feels personal getting cancellation emails, especially since each one adds a ton of work trying to replace them.¹⁰ And that’s work that’s not actually improving the larp, which makes it particularly wearisome.

So some other year I might have felt it was a little too close to the run¹¹ but this year I’m primed to be sympathetic. And I really am looking forward to seeing what they do with it. Larping’s overrun with a bunch of wizards and vampires. Let’s go play some spooks.

Next: Oslo (OSL) to Manchester (MAN)
Prev: New York City (JFK) to London (LHR)

Footnotes

¹ There are very good reasons to enter Portugal from a non-Schengen country if you’re interviewing with immigration. You have to prove you entered the country legally. If you fly direct you have a passport stamp. Otherwise you need to keep your boarding pass from your flight and explain your itinerary to the official and who wants to deal with that mess?

² And a good thing too, because this is the season of the rail strikes in the United Kingdom and I discovered yet another one happening when I landed. But I landed Saturday, had nowhere to be and nothing to do anyway, so I could wait for a bus — delayed an hour due to all the traffic — arriving at Stansted a mere four hours after I landed. I can’t imagine the state I’d have been in if I had a flight to catch that day.

³ I’ve been in London a grand total of 66 days over the last four years. I can skip a couple.

⁴ I’m in the middle of Bodies Bodies Bodies right now and I have no idea how I got on a horror comedy kick a few years ago — I generally can’t stand slasher movies — but here we are. I guess I’ll watch anything with Lee Pace in it.

⁵ I’m still excitedly awaiting the second season of Slow Horses, still easily one of my top TV shows of the year.

⁶ One of the organizers actually said they’d see me there, thinking I was signed up, and was incredibly confused when I said I wasn’t. They said they’d look into it and never got back to me. As a larp organizer, I sympathize with their confusion.

⁷ Luckily “US embassy staff in 1970s Norway” doesn’t exactly scream clotheshorse to me.

⁸ Including mine. Feel free to sign up, even for a sponsored ticket. We’re scrambling to fill vacancies.

⁹ To my chagrin, I had to cancel a larp I had been looking forward to earlier this year because it got double-booked over something I couldn’t back out from, and I know that one was hurting for players. I still feel guilty, but it happens.

¹⁰ Rare is the larp which can absorb completely arbitrary drop outs. There’s usually a few key characters which are load bearing, in a sense. Most of the larp flows in and around them. They might not even be the most fun to play — better the meddling dowager queen than the reigning king — but they’re crucial to the design.

¹¹ I actually turned down an last-minute offer for a different larp earlier this year, on similar grounds.