Welcome!

The important stuff....

Date: 5-7th February
Venue: Grantham Ramada
Guests: UK - Gwen Knighton Raftery; US - Vixy and Tony

Important registration information!

The price for registration will be GOING UP from Sunday December 13th 2009! Please see the registration page for details.

Also note the deadlines:
Programme slot request: December 1st 2009.
Hotel booking: December 31st 2009
And remember that in order to book either a programme slot or a room you must be a member of the convention!

Why Van der Filk?

We had originally intended to exploit French numbers to contrive a suitable pun for the name, and mount the whole convention in the back of a Ford Transit van which would spend the whole convention weekend driving along the French autoroutes, thus saving hotel function space costs and campsite costs, and guaranteeing there'd always be something new and interesting to look at out of the windows if you got bored with the music... But then we added up the hire cost of the string of 97 caravans for accomodation, plus fuel for 100 vehicles (That's including the flatbed carrying the two portaloos, and the hot dog van), plus the cost of carbon credits to offset our footprint, plus the sheer damn fiddliness of setting up rope bridges between all those moving vehicles so people could get about... and it all started to look a little bit impractical. So we ended up keeping the name (but with an extra "r"), and justifying its use by hiring a retired Dutch detective to investigate the suitablility of various British hotels instead. And that's how we came to be right back here... and why the con's called "Van der Filk".