We’re all back in the office now, getting back to normal life after our incredibly fun, appropriately raucous and strangely surreal time at the SFX Weekender. We’ve been looking though our photos, which we feel we ought to share with you.

To be honest, there are certain things we can’t really tell you about – e.g. what shapes were being thrown by Rose Tremlett and myself on the dancefloor to Craig Charles’ DJ set, how unreasonably scared we were of the Stormtroopers, how many dubious sausages of questionable origin were consumed throughout the weekend, and how funny a certain agent doing the “mime-walking-down-the-stairs” trick outside our chalet window was . . . but the majority of the weekend is rather accurately documented in the below photos.

We’ll start at the beginning, when we were accosted at the entrance by a rather friendly, rather enormous yeti. I think my face diplays the confusing mixture of pure delight and abject terror this creature inspired in me.

 Then after a quick refreshment at the Orbit chalet . . .

We toddled along to the excellent party at the luxurious Tor cottage. There, we sampled the delights of Julie Crisp’s out-of-this-world brownies and perhaps a little too much Jack Daniels, brandy and Japanese whisky. But a fantastic time was had by all! Many thanks to everyone at Tor, and here’s Anne with Gary Gibson and the perpetually cool Jon Courtenay Grimwood:

And James with the lovely Peter F. Hamilton:

  

The next morning, feeling surprisingly sprightly, we went to watch our authors Kate Griffin and Jon Courtenay Grimwood speak very eloquently in a few panels:

Before following them to a signing of their new books on the Forbidden Planet stand:

But they couldn’t help but be distracted by some rather sinister creatures sweeping round the room . . .

No – we’re not talking about the hung-over Orbit team! We mean the Nazgûl – which were actually very frightening . . .  

But at least we had some light relief from Titan, the Robot Entertainer. This was probably the most impressive costume of the whole weekend (but we won’t pretend we weren’t a teensy bit scared he’d stop singing Frank Sinatra, override his commands and kill us all).

So in order to cope, certain members of our Orbit posse headed to the arcade to have a ‘friendly’ little air hockey tournement:

Whilst Bella and I braved the elements Captain Scott-style on the rather chilly Camber Sands beach:

That’s before we were all reunited back at the Main Void stage for the very impressive SFX award ceremony, and no SFF party would be complete without the Dark Side turning up:

All in all we had an absolutely fantastic time, and want to say thanks so much to the SFX team for putting on such a great event. We caught up with old friends, made some great new ones, and most importantly had a jolly good ol’ knees up! Here we are at Rye station about to get on the train home – sad that the weekend is over (but very glad to soon be regaining our 3G signal!)