of things that had to be done In the end we decided to go to the Great Wall and not the party, probably a wise decision because we would need as much sleep as we could get before the real fun began. Looking up my copy of the programme I saw the Great Wall began at 6 and rang Valma to let her know that Stephen Solomon would be taking his electronic equipment to our place and that he'd be able to get her back into the city. Then I went back to the convention and listened while Lee Harding talked about the Writer's Workshop which had apparently been a great success, David Grigg's story had been chosen as the equal best with John Alderson. David wasn't there to accept the congratulations, he was feeling poorly and had gone home to rest up for the evenings festivities. With the convention officially closed - "You can go home now" - the ballroom quickly emptied, all except us poor hard working committee members and helpers who had to clean up the mess. The art show had to be dismantled, the drawing pins put back in their box and somebody found who owned the slide projector. There was paper everywhere and the other usual junk, the problem was (as always) not the time taken in picking it up but trying to find somebody who wanted it. Throwing it all into the rubbish bin would have been a good idea but the bins were already full. But, the place finally looked as if the convention had never happened, it's always a little bit strange to see a convention hotel when all the fans have left. There were still a few of us still waiting about though for somebody to come and pronounce the word that would be the end of it. A discussion developed about naval tactics, why the Japanese lost the Battle of Midway, the value of the new angle deck carrier/cruiser and tactics for knocking out missile armed submarines in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. "What time is it, Anne?" "Ten to Six," "We may as well go up to the Great Wall then. There was an open flagon of some white wine, whoever had opened it hadn't drunk much and it still seemed to be okay so somebody hid it under their jacket to keep it from the prying eyes of the hotel staff as we passed through the lobby and we walked up Swanston Street to the restaurant. Up the stairs, through the door and the convention was, after all, still alive and in fullswing. Maybe even more alive. At tables everywhere fans sat in groups of eight, the place was full of them, Valma had saved a space for Paul Stokes and I so we sat and waited, helping ourselves to the wine from the flagon and sampling the home brew of a couple at out table. The food, when it came, was not as delicious or as large in quantity as we'd had at the previous fan Great Wall but it was thoroughly enjoyable. We had to explain to some people that half the point of a Great Wall is being messy, the judgement of whether the meal had been enjoyed was the amount of bleach they had to use to get the table cloths white again, even though the place we were at had spoiled the spirit of the evening by using red table cloths. One woman at our table was not impressed, disgusted in fact, by the messy delight we took with our food, for a moment I felt like making some sarcastic comment, but I was enjoying our neo-barbarity too much to get worked up about it. There were maybe six or seven courses which lasted a couple of hours, the service wasn't exceptional so the courses weren't timed with the precision that can make a meal like that something to remember for years, but neither was the price which was just short of cheap, by which I mean that a pie and with sauce is considarably cheaper but you don't