Much to praise though sadly this was not a science fiction convention without its flaws and problems.
The good stuff.
1/. The best thing was the reunion factor, seeing many lovely friends after the two year break from conventioning caused by Covid (and my own personal health concerns). 2/. There was a terrific programme of events, and some outstanding highlights included a screening of The Stooge, a fan film based on the work of lovely guest of honour Christopher Priest, 3/. and the beer tasting party was fabulous (though it ran in direct parallel to the shambolic Mediterranean banquet. 4/. Bar staff were very friendly, helpful and efficient. 5/. Playing Scrabble with some of my friends was huge fun.
The regrettable negatives, most of which relate to the hotel.
1/. The con had been scheduled to take place in Nottingham, but the hotel there was registered as a stand-by Nightingale Hospital, a status it retains until at least Xmas, The Palace Hotel in Buxton must have seemed a great choice as a replacement especially in its location right next to the great spa town’s railway station (serving as the station Hotel until recently, and now booking rather tired and run down. The hotel gets many negative reviews on Trip Advisor, which I thought and hoped to be exaggerated or false but many are rather too accurate with the benefit of hindsight. The bars stopped serving around 11pm, and though the con committee kept saying they would get this extended for the remaining nights it never changed. https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotel_Review-g190756-d192010-Reviews-The_Palace_Hotel-Buxton_Derbyshire_England.html
2/. While the con took place entirely on the ground floor making disabled access easy, (apart from in getting suitcases up the main entrance steps) guest bedrooms were upstairs and approached by a dreadful rickety lift that had clearly seen better days. It was slow and often ignored attempts to summon it, or instruct it as to which floor to visit. It was in many ways reflective of the Hotel’s crumbling stance on quality. If it is wearing down don’t fix it right way but leave it until it fully breaks. The lift quality is likely to continue to deteriorate unattended until someone gets trapped in it.
3/. Rooms – cold as there is little heating and windows were left wide open to let air in to help fight Covid. I closed mine right away. Though I don’t want Covid I don’t want hypothermia either. Much con space was equally freezing.
4/. Electric Key Cards and locks – Here a minor inconvenience turned much more serious, distressing, dangerous and embarrassing for me personally. I never like the electronic door keys and much prefer metal keys and Yale style locks. The keys at the Royal frequently failed and needed resetting. This meant delays in getting into rooms to have to take the keys down to reception (in the rickety lift) to get them reset. My key seemed to break in this way early on the Saturday morning, so I got it reset and went back to my room, only for it to still fail to interact with the door. This was more than just a minor inconvenience and delay. The reason I needed to get to my room was that my successful bowel cancer treatment has left me with a stoma bag, which was getting very full and in need of a rapid change. The delay in getting into my room, to remove and dispose of the full bag, clean the stoma wound and apply a fresh bag routinely meant the full bag was splitting away from my abdomen. Its contents were leaking over my waist and into my tee shirt, jeans and underwear. I was in effect, crapping myself through my stomach. To my horror, the key failing a second time proved the key was not faulty, but the key reading lock was. I now had a staggering forty-five minute wait for an engineer to replace my room’s door lock while trying desperately not to dribble my poo over the floor. No masterkey seemed to be possible to use to access the room. It was totally dependent on a useless computer accessory.
Once it was fixed I rushed into the room, changed my stoma, and took off all my messed up clothes, showered, got dressed again and then had to go to reception for a third time to get a new key tuned to the new lock (the key failed again the next night).
5/. Con Committee Staff Member reaction to the above – I thought I should alert the con committee to the problem I had had, even though it was primarily a hotel problem – we do after all have a committee liaison officer. A leading member was passing so I started to describe my issues, to which she flippant replied “It’s all part of the fun. It wouldn’t be Novacon without a few hiccups would it’ and walked off with utter indifference to hearing me complete my story.
My answer – NO! It is not the slightest remotest bit funny or amusing when hotel dilapidation turns a minor crisis into a potential medical emergency that causes someone already diagnosed with depression and anxiety such unpleasant, embarrassing discomfort. Had i got to my room unobstructed it would never have been a problem. There are many reasons why guests might need to visit their hotel rooms quickly and suddenly; angina meds for a heart condition, diabetic insulin, a need to catch a train within a short time period (the 45 minute delay could cause more than just missing a part of the programme and convention we have paid to attend. Inability to get into a room allocated to you for any reason is an emergency. The con needs to log that such events happen to its members so it serves as a record and helps future convention organizers decide whether a given venue should be reused again or not. Walking away when a con attendee is trying to describe such a horrible situation while telling said con-goer it is ‘funny’ was incredibly rude, uncaring, insensitive, offensive and inappropriate. Worse was to come.
6/. The Banquet Fiasco. The Sunday night flagship event was the conjoined Beer Tasting and Mediterranean Buffet Meal. The lovely beer tasting event involved fans bringing in bottles or cans of beer (three each), to add to a table for everyone to pick drinks from (fans not bringing in beer could pay to sample the beers and those attending got a badge to wear to say we were invited / involved. This worked flawlessly, with some great ale discoveries to be made. The beers I took in went down well for those picking them out too.
In tandem with the beer tasting there was the banquet, which attendees could go to without going for beer and it cost £13.95 to attend. (separate to the £6.00 admission fee for non-beer providers at the beer tasting event.
No badge was issued to banquet attendees but a ticket was given to all who paid to go. Alas no effort was made to take or inspect the tickets so it is not inconceivable that some guests got a free meal and given the disaster looming that is more conceivable than it may initially sound.
The banquet menu looked impressive, including salads, peta breads, kebabs, salmon, chips and much more. As the price was way above the usual restaurant charge for buffet meals many, myself included expected high quality food and plenty of it.
When the food was put out in the serving area, it looked good, but clearly not enough to feed everyone attending.
Some diners never waited to be told to get theirs but simply helped themselves to heaped platefuls uninvited. Word finally came round that the guest speakers, committee and volunteers were to be served first and then ‘hotel staff’ would tell us table by table when it was our turn to go up. Like most I felt this was a fine sensible arrangement.
After the staff and VIP’s ate, the food tables were left unattended and just sitting there, for over thirty minutes. Occasionally the announcement was made that we should wait to be told when to join the queue before going up. This was ridiculous as there was no queue at all. Several individuals and one whole table mutinied and went for the food anyway. No attempt was made to challenge or stop them even though this was going on in plain sight of everyone including the committee members most in charge of organizing the event.
Finally the committee gave up waiting for hotel staff to do what they could have easily done themselves from the start and approach a table with the simple words ‘you can go up now’.
It was clear within a few tables being served that the supply of food was depleting and empty containers were not being replaced or replenished. Regrettably some of the premature diners made this worse by going back for seconds and some diners had so much food on their plates that there was little left to choose from by the time the last two tables (one of them being that which I was on), got the green light to get some food. Virtually all the promised hot food, including the ‘french fries’ chips were stone cold by the time we got near them thanks to the needless long time the food was left just sitting there.
As we ate one committee member (the same lady who dismissed my room lock out as ‘funny’ as if it was too trivial to bother her with came over to offer a sort of apology to those of us who had missed out on some of the food, and offer a partial refund if any us required it.
She blamed A/.The Hotel B/. Attendees taking more than their share and jumping the queue.
To my disgust she then turned and snapped at me that I had clearly got enough to eat and wouldn’t qualify. This was blatantly untrue and unfair. I never queue jumped and my plate was hardly stacked up, and I had missed out many of the foods entirely. I’m instructed by my medics to eat lots of fish. I was relieved to see seafood on the buffet menu but I got no fish whatsoever. I was told by a fellow diner that a few strays anchovies could be found in the lettuce leaves left in the fish trays. I was hardly going to go back foraging for scraps.
The queue jumping was inexcusable but easy to police if the committee had made an effort, like simply standing someone by the food to point anyone approaching back to their seats.
That some diners took a lot of food (sometimes more than they could eat given how much uneaten food was left wasted on several plates) as not always down to greed and selfishness. Some were leaving the convention from home right after the meal we had each paid so much over the odds and under the value of what was offered for. Many like me (the non-jumper-hoarder) expected the meagre supply to be replenished until it obviously wasn’t. Others panicked because some were so openly getting away with going up prematurely with zero effort to stop them and in some cases going twice before others, like me went once, so they got in while they thought it was still worth it (an eerie echo of Covid Lockdown panic buying).
The committee were right to aportion some blame to the ones jumping the queue and the hotel staff for not providing enough food for all. It was extremely inappropriate however for one committee member to so randomly slap me down so casually and rudely in front of my fellow fans as if I was in some way involved in some or any way in the panic food grab going on. Nobody else was left feeling singled out for blame for the problems including many who actually blatantly and openly engaged in them. By the time I legitimately got served I couldn’t have hoarded if I wanted to – by the time I visited the tables there was precious little left to hoard. There was no fish and only three small meat kebabs. I consciously took just one, so as not to rob those behind me of the remainder, but without any evidence before her eyes and lots of evidence of the actual queue jumping being totally ignored and not stopped or prevented by the committee until it was too late.
Many offered a refund were polite enough to waive it, as would be my stance, but the attitude that I was confronted with without provocation, on top of the earlier dismissal of my excremental crisis due to bad hotel management maintenance, makes me inclined to cal for my partial reimbursement and an apology on principle.
At the closing ceremony committee members admitted that there had been ‘a few niggling minor issues’ at the Palace, which was rather dismissive – they were often not niggling or petty at all, especially to those affected. I, a grown man, was left actually streaming my own excrement because a hotel can’t be bothered giving its door locks a health and safety inspection and maintenance overall. Hearing that dismissed as ‘funny’, a ‘joke’ or such a ‘niggling minor event that it shouldn’t be elevated to a more serious level of concern, was deeply saddening. Maybe by actually listening to what concerns attendees raise instead of brushing them aside with flippancy and flouncing off in mid conversation, such funny joky niggles won’t tarnish the smooth running of future conventions.
Yes, some fans behaved badly, yes the hotel caterers offered a misleading meal deal, but the committee absolutely must take on some of the blame for this disaster too.
Despite this, the overall con was great, and I know many worked hard to make it happen. I hope however that the glaring mistakes made are not repeated by the Novacon 51 Committee especially as they aim to revisit the Buxton Palace Hotel again for the 2022 event. Serious lessons and sensitivities need to be learned.
Arthur Chappell
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