HARRIET WADHAM AT THE WEIRD WEEKEND

In August Jon Downes hosted The Weird Weekend 2009, where people from all over the world gathered for a weekend of weirdness, packed full of lectures on Atlantis, Big Grey Men of Ben Macdhui, and many other interesting subjects.

Now me being ten years of age, I attended the ‘Bigfoot for kids’ lecture, which was held by Paul Vella. It gave me an inspiration to write a book about Bigfoot when I’m older. But then again, I have got about a billion stories running at the moment (at the same time!!), so it might have to wait for quite a while.

The whole lecture was really very interesting; we were granted permission to handle Bigfoot footprints and Paul showed us a famous film of Bigfoot that two men called Roger Patterson and Gimlin captured while on a hunt for one. Patterson and Gimlin were on horseback when they spotted the creature, but Patterson’s horse got a bit frightened and backed away. Patterson hopped off his horse, and began to film Bigfoot. Bigfoot started to get further away, so as we didn’t have zoom lenses on cameras in those days, he had to run after it, which made the film very shaky. Now if it had been a person in a gorilla costume – which is highly improbable - it would have had to be "A very good gorilla costume, because if you look closely, you can see that there are calf muscles on the legs."

Personally, the part of the lecture I enjoyed the most is the part I’ve just gone on about - The Bigfoot film. I was intrigued by the film to do a talk about Bigfoot at the next Bugfest that my parents organise. I hope that I can, anyway. Here is frame 352 from the film of Bigfoot.

In fact, I would definitely go back to the Weird Weekend next year; then again, Mum is already thinking about going back, so I’m guessing I’ve got to! But that’s a good thing, because I enjoyed it IMMENSELY!! I even had my first taste of... CHEESY CHIPS!! They were absolutely scrumdiddlyumptious (As the B.F.G would say)! You can see my monster book in the bottom right corner, behind the flowers. You’ll read about it in a second.

All the lectures were interesting and jam-packed full of information, with lots of slideshows to go with them.

The highlight of my whole weekend was probably meeting an author (Neil Arnold) and getting a book signed (MONSTER! The A-Z of Zooform Phenomena). Then Mum told me that I’d met lots of authors already, but without knowing it! Of course that had made my day, getting a book signed and meeting lots of authors - even though it was obliviously - but I was also happy that I had made new friends, and had so much fun at the Weird Weekend 2009.