Aussiecon 4 registration actually opened on the Wednesday, and I went along before going on the pub crawl, but all I got was a badge - no clip or lanyard - and a voucher for the rest of the stuff, which wasn't available till Thursday morning.

The pocket programme book had the unusual feature that the alphabetic list of programme items included definite and indefinite articles in its sort, so the panel on The Fermi Paradox was listed immediately after The Fantasy Plays of William Shakespeare, but 40 pages after Far Futures: Where Fantasy meets SF.

As I was waiting for the opening ceremony to begin, I got my camera out to prepare to take some pictures.  The camera jammed and refused to take any pictures.  What brilliant timing.  I replaced the batteries, which enabled to do some stuff, such as retract the lens and look at pictures I'd taken in Sydney.  In fact, I could now do everything with the camera except to take pictures.

I went to a number of panels, and they were usually interesting.  I didn't go to the masquerade, as Worldcon masquerades are now so long I get bored.  Ironically, I'm told that this year's masquerade was very short.  I didn't get to see the off-colour comment that led to a brouhaha later.  However, the next day I did see someone wearing a Hero badge.  I asked her what she'd done to get that.  Apparently, she'd turned up as a volunteer to gopher on the masquerade and ended up directing it.  As she explained it, the planned director of the masquerade had resigned a month before the convention - I don't know the details - and nobody was willing to take on the job at a month's notice.  Perry Middlemiss, co-chair of the convention and head of the Events Division, feared he was going to have to do it himself, but this woman who turned up on the day seemed to be getting things done, so they gave her the job.

I went to both the Australian Awards ceremony and the Hugo Awards.  The former had a curious mixture of seriousness and fannishness, as if the Novas at Novacon had got mixed with the Hugo ceremony.  I can't imagine a Hugo award being introduced for Best Fannish Cat any time soon.

The Hugo ceremony circumvented two of the major technical problems that can occur.  Firstly, they showed a video right at the start of the ceremony of the year 2009 in SF, including clips from major films and TV shows, pictures of nominated books and authors and the like.  So, when it came to the Dramatic presentation awards, they did not show clips of the nominees.  And, when the winners were announced, they did not attempt to display the name of the winner.  It only takes someone being over eager at pressing the button to ruin the surprise and reveal the winner too soon.

When Sean McMullen read out the list of nominees for Best Novella, he stumbled over the name "Palimpsest", and of course that was the title which won, so he had to say it again.  Congratulations to Charlie Stross.  And then, in the Best Novel category, there was another nominee called Palimpsest, but Kim Stanley Robinson knew how to pronounce it by now.  When he started to announce the winner with the words "Statistical anomalies do occur..." my immediate thought was that Palimpsest was the winner here, too, but he instead announced a tie between The City & The City and The Windup Girl.

I don't know what happened to the planned parties.  They were supposed to be on a floor of the Crowne Plaza Hotel (which under a different name was the main con hotel back in 1999) but most of Thursday I was hearing about how the hotel were not going to allow this now, and no food or drink was to be served in the function rooms.  Furious negotiations seemed to be going on behind the scenes so that parties were allowed in some of the function rooms, and extra negotiations led, I'm told, by James Bacon, meant that the London in 2014 parties had not only beer supplied by the hotel but whisky and Pimm's brought over expressly for the parties.

Still, when I went to the first party on the Thursday night I thought there may be problems.  Two of the so called function rooms were open plan areas of a mezzanine floor above the hotel reception.  The main access to this area was from an escalator, but it was also on the access route to the lifts to the rooms for hotel residents.  Coming up the escalator you had to go through the gap between the two parties, which was OK, but if you had bulky luggage you didn't want to try and carry up the escalator there was another lift which opened out inside the party area.  At some point during the party I was surprised to see a number of air crew struggling to push large suitcases through the middle of the party.

The London parties not only had alcohol, they also had British food: battenburgs, bakewell tart, shortbread.  I was not so much worried I'd get drunk as I'd have a sugar high.

After the closing ceremony, there wasn't much to do.  Fans hung around the foyer area of the convention centre until it was time to go off and eat.  Someone recommended to me and Philip Chee an all you can eat buffet restaurant in the nearby casino so we investigated that, but there was no official dead dog party to go to afterwards, so I went back to my hotel to pack and watch TV.

When I started getting interested in music in the late sixties, early seventies, the Australian-born composer Percy Grainger seemed to be a peripheral figure.  He had been a folk song collector and a virtuoso pianist, but I don't recall his music being played much.  There was a song, much played on the radio in the sixties, called In an English Country Garden which was based on one of his pieces, but I didn't find that out till much later.

This changed in the seventies with the publication of a biography and many revelations about his sex life, which seems to have involved whips.  Apparently a play called A Whip-round for Percy Grainger was performed in Melbourne in the the year of the centenary of his birth, 1982.  And his music did start to get played.

When I went to Australia for the first time in 1985, the Melbourne Arts Centre had an exhibition about him which I visited.  I particularly remember a recording of Shallow Brown, his setting of an old sea shanty, being played as I wandered about the room.  When I got home, I bought a record (vinyl) of some of his music, and have since acquired a few CDs.

The exhibition also mentioned a Percy Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne but I didn't have time to get to that.  When I got back to Melbourne in 1999, I finally got to visit it.  (By a lucky chance, I got there just as music students from the university were putting on a concert of new pieces.)  The exhibition includes a number of his whips, and the confession he wrote, to be opened ten years after his death, detailing his sexual  predilections.

There was also a poster for a film called Passion, which dramatised an incident from Grainger's life when he had an affair with one of his piano students.  This film turned up on Channel 4 in the UK a couple of year later, broadcast in the early hours of the morning.  This was at the time when Sarah Michelle Gellar was fronting an ad campaign for Maybelline cosmetics.  I remember this, because after a particularly torrid scene in the film involving many whips, it cut to an ad break and there was Buffy herself advertising mascara with the slogan, "Give me the lashes I love."  I wonder if this was a deliberate joke by someone at Channel 4.

Also on display were some of Grainger's free music machines.  Grainger disliked the limitations of traditional instruments and performers and built machines to produce sounds from electronic oscillators controlled by paper rolls, driven by old vacuum cleaner motors, it would appear.

So, having arrived in Melbourne this year, the first thing I did the next morning was to walk up to the university in the pouring rain to visit the museum.

It was closed.  There was a café round the back (called Percy's Place) and I asked there.  They said the re-opening of the museum keeps on being put back and it was now due to re-open in September.  I presume the place was being renovated.  The Grainger Museum website still doesn't say the place had re-opened.

So I went shopping.

Spent a couple of hours on the Monday going round Sydney Aquarium.  Sharks seem to be their main theme, but they have plenty of other fish found in Australian waters, such as the common yabby.  I remember having yabby salad at a restaurant in Melbourne back in 1999.  It's a freshwater shellfish, a type of crayfish.

There are a couple of large tanks - swimming pool size - that have perspex tubes running through them through which you can walk and watch the fish swim by.  One of these contains a number of sharks.  A notice points out that people think the curvature of the glass makes the sharks look bigger.  Actually, it makes them look smaller than they really are.

The other tank contains dugongs (and some very spectacular rays).  Dugongs, or sea-cows, are said to be the origin of the mermaid legends but the one that sat on the tube right over where I was standing was most definitely not a mermaid.  I was surprised none of the kids standing about decided to embarrass their parents with questions like, "What's that long tube on its front, Mummy?"  So, is a male dugong still called a sea-cow?.

The gift shop had a number of stuffed toy dugongs on sale (without penises) and one full size one which wasn't for sale.  Would never have got it in my suitcase, anyway.

Passing the aquarium is the Sydney monorail, which my guidebook tells me is known by the locals as the "monster rail".  As a means of getting from A to B it's a bit of a non-starter, as the track forms a loop about a kilometer square, and it's probably quicker to walk between any two stations rather than waiting for a train.  But it does give tourists an interesting view of the centre of the city.

The peninsula from which the south side of the Sydney Bridge starts is known as The Rocks.  The oldest dwelling house in Sydney is preserved there.  There's a small plaza which gives the best view of the Opera House (except possibly from a boat).  You can also see the bridge quite well.  Apparently, you can take a walk over the arch of the bridge and I could see the specks that were people apparently doing this.  Well, with my head for heights, there's no way I was going to do this.

As I arrived in the area, I nearly ran into a gaggle of people staring at the sky.  I looked up and overhead a small aircraft was writing a message in smoke.  The word IMAGINE was the result.  I sat down in the plaza and you could see the word slowly drift northwards across the harbour.  Then I noticed the plane was back and writing another word.  I could see FLORI and guessed it might be a travel company advertising holidays in Florida, maybe.  But the next two letters were A and D in that order.  The full word was FLORIADE.

My first thought was that the pilot had made a mistake writing Florida and tried to cover the mistake by turning it into a nonsense word.  I recall one of the A.P Herbert Misleading Cases where a political candidate hires a skywriter to advertise his campaign but the pilot is a supporter of his rival candidate and puts misprints into the message that turns it into an insult.  The legal minds have to decide whether in English law this is libel (written down, a permanent item) or slander (spoken and ephemeral).

Then, a couple of days later I saw a reference to Floriade.  Turns out it's a flower festival held in Canberra in September.