Who would have thought that when the forum first started it would eventually lead to members meeting up in ‘real life’? After a smaller initial gathering in Southampton it was decided that we should make a special effort to celebrate the forum’s first birthday. Because of the availability of transport links, and because it seemed an interesting place to go, we settled on meeting up in the British Museum, although as all present will remember not a great deal of that historic establishment was explored!
It was a strange experience initially, for me at least, to meet all these characters that I knew mostly by their User names only, and with faces only vaguely recognisable from the occasional avatar or profile picture. I think my biggest worry was that no-one would turn up, a secondary concern being that they might all be axe-murdering psychopaths, many of them armed with pointy insulin-delivering implements. Thankfully (to my knowledge) no-one turned up with an axe, and I was privileged to meet some wonderful, friendly, funny people that I felt I knew already from their various postings.
It soon became apparent that we were all exceedingly thirsty, so the more tech-savvy amongst the group set about using their portable telephones to locate a hostelry capable of sustaining our numbers for the remainder of the day – and on into the evening in some cases! Thus, many pints were drunk and profiteroles consumed at the Shakespeare’s Head Wetherspoons in Holborn – a venue chosen for our subsequent second birthday this year. It was like we’d never been away!
I think it is a mark of the forum’s success that people are prepared to travel great distances in order to meet up with others from the forum (from as far away as Glasgow to meets in Birmingham and London!), and spend a day together chatting sometimes about diabetes, but mostly not. Some true and lasting friendships have been made, and I’m sure even more will be made in the future. Perhaps it is partly the common bond of our relationship with diabetes that promotes such understanding between people, but beyond that they are all lovely people that I have spent some of the best days of the past two years with. This was our first big gathering, but there have been many more, and I have no doubt many more to come!
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