Hobbit Hunting

We went hobbit hunting today. This involves getting up at 5:15 am and driving down to Milton Keynes (an invented place near London) to attend CollectorMania 4. Although I am a gadget person (oops - nearly put freak there..) I've never been one for so-called "collectable's".These seem to be things designed and made simply to deprive you of your hard earned cash. Like children - only shinier. And as for autographed items from the stars themselves, pah, most of these are signed in a machine which was probably made in Milton Keynes. I only really went because number one daughter had an urge for hobbit signatures, and how can I deny this.

The event itself was held in a shopping centre in Milton Keynes. I've no idea whether this actually was in the centre of the city/town, in that the place doesn't seem to have a centre at all, just a bunch of roundabouts and gridded roads which lead you in a different direction from the last one whilst looking exactly the same. However, I suppose the name "thecentre:MK" might be a clue here. Which is a bit of a shame....

So we end up in "thecentre:MK" looking for a bunch of characters from Middle Earth. Seems appropriate. Just us and several thousand other people who got there earlier and have pre-booked all the places. You had to queue to get a ticket which let you go and queue again, only later. If you were unlucky - like us, you ended up queuing for tickets for queues which might not actually exist if our hobbit got bored of the signings and went home early.

Anyhoo, we were lucky in that we did get to meet up with Gollum, or at least Andy Serkis, the man who brought him to life. We queued for tickets to queue for him, and found we were actually queuing for him (if you see what I mean). And so we got autographed pictures. And shook hands with Andy (I feel I can call him that now) who is a really nice chap. And I, to my eternal shame, asked him to say "My Precioussss" into the camera. Something which, to his eternal credit, he did with aplomb. Meantime daughter goes off and by a combination of deviousness, luck and good contacts manages to get the pictures she wanted.

The only snag was that we had to do a lot of waiting around. In a shopping centre. The bigger problem was that they had loads of stalls there selling bits and bobs which were rather nice. They had a whole shed full of stuff that I would have really liked (perhaps I am one for collectables after all). The Robbie the Robot they had was priced a bit on the high side, but I did manage to talk myself into getting a remote controlled Dalek. It is now standing in our front room guarding the fireplace. I'm not actually counting the days to the next event; but if they have one - I'll be there.

Just half an hour earlier....