I don’t remember much about Monday. I guess Sunday night after the Hugos was a good night.

There’s a sense of anti-climax about the last day of a con*. Some people leave straight after breakfast, others hang around longer, and some stay on till the next day. The Grand Ballroom had two tracks of program events rather than the usual three or four, culminating in a closing ceremony at 3pm. Two of the program items sound wittier in the summary than I suspect they were in actuality.

• We’ll Do It Better Next Year: The Constellation Committee (Baltimore in ’83) tell us what they have up their sleeves.
• And We’ll Do It Even Better: The euphoric winners of the 1984 worldcon bid start their decline.

It’s a day of goodbyes and see-you-next-years (though the various fan groups were probably already deciding where they would have dinner the next night back home). So it was strange to carry on meeting new people. I actually got to say hello to Ross Pavlac, the co-chair of Chicon IV, and a clutch of authors: Joe Haldeman and his wife Gay, Joan Vinge, and Somtow Sucharitkul. I’d read Haldeman’s ‘The Forever War’ but nothing by the other two, making conversation a little strained and general – but then, they probably hadn’t read any of my stuff either. It turns out that they were actually quite nice, which might have made writing critical reviews of their books harder, if I had carried on writing critical reviews of books.

In the evening there was a dead dog party in room 1583, it says here.

And the next day I left Chicago, travelling west.

* Or maybe it’s just me.

I felt a similar sense of anti-climax when I left my first job to join Shell in 1982, and when I retired from Shell nearly thirty years later, despite the leaving drinks on both occasions. On that last day, I held a couple of last handover meetings, completed the tidying up of my desk and the clearing of my filing (both paper and electronic), and then went up to the observation platform on top of Shell Centre tower, 25 floors up. It was the first time I’d been up there in all those years, and the last, of course. At the end of the day, some work friends and I gathered in All Bar One in the former County Hall building for a pint or three. I handed my security pass to my closest friend in Shell, another Kevin, to give to Security. And that was it. What was I expecting? Party poppers? Fireworks? The USC marching Band?

Well, not quite ‘it’. There was still SOGs, the Shell Old Gits, but that’s another story.