Trip report

Brighton Zinefest was amazing. Completely, utterly amazing.

Saturday was workshop day. I managed to squish in all but one of the workshops, although I didn't get to attend all of them in full. The day started out with vegan cookery, ended with survival discussion and had all sorts of things packed in the middle. I learnt how to screenprint without using a camera bulb and how to rock a beetroot salad (and some stuff about zines I guess). That evening there was a fundraiser gig at the same place to help pay for all the spaces hired. Since I hadn't managed to get much sleep the previous night (because OMG BZF!), I ended up falling asleep on the sofa while a very loud electropunk band played about twenty feet away. Talk about sleeping like a sailor. I was awoken by a very sweaty guy collapsing next to me. Since sofas at gigs are not exactly the most comfortable places to sleep, I went and asked my lovely host if she could show me the way to her house, which she did, even though she had been tending bar. It is amazing how generous and friendly a lot of people you meet in the zine world are.

Sunday was the day of the fair. I managed to hitch a lift from a guy with the car to the place it was being held. Once I saw how steep the hill up there was, I was really fracking glad I hadn't tried to walk. I got there earlier than the start and was the only person upstairs when I arrived, so I spent some time trying to make my table look pretty (and measuring and remeasuring to make sure I didn't take up more than half of it). My fellow table occupants had a very smart looking art zine that I would have assumed was an actual magazine had I seen it in a shop. Fortunately the guy sitting next to was more my type: a grotty activist punk called Andrew Lips who still uses myspace but has some pretty good music on there that you should definitely go check out. Andrew also runs a distro of sorts, ie has a batch of zines carried around in a box held together with parcel tape.

The first couple of hours were pretty quiet and mostly involved people wandering around checking out each other's stalls. It was after lunch that things starting getting busy. Also, there were kids. And when I say kids I'm not talking about the fabulously mignon little pixie who writes Peach Melba. These were actual, primary-school-attending children. Which was a bit of a problem since I'd taken patches I'd made to try and pay for my train fare. Embroidered patches saying things like FUCK Y'ALL and SHOOT YR RAPIST. Every time one of them ran up to my table to have a look at the knitted monkeys I also had, I was forced to sweep all my patches behind the stall so they wouldn't wander back to their parents and ask 'mum, what does that mean?'. It hadn't really occured to me that there would be kids attending which turned out to be a massive fuck up on my part.

The patches were actually pretty popular despite their frequent disappearances. I only had a couple left by the end of the day, and wished that I had made a few more. I managed to sell out of xyz 1 entirely, and was left with only a couple of copies of issue 2 after Tukru bought five for Vampire Sushi (yay!). I'd say that out of all my zines, xyz 1 moved fastest, followed by Hunkerdown, then D and finally poor old xyz 2. Maybe because it has a baby on the front cover? Still, someone came along saying they were setting up a UK parenting distro, and was the zine aimed at parents? So there's a potential use for all the copies of xyz 2 I have left over.

I kept running downstairs in a panic because that was where Sarah Tea Rex was tabled and she was the only person I'd met before Saturday. "Sarah, help! Someone with grubby hands is touching all my zines!" "Sarah, I sold a zine!" "Sarah, the people next to me are all smart and fancy!" She was very nice about it and did not tell me to shut the fuck up and go back upstairs once. Props to that lady.

Anyway, I returned on Sunday night tired but happy and with a stack of zines that I'm going to be working my way through and possibly reviewing once I get the time. I'm starting my new job tomorrow, so we shall see how everything goes.