Sunday

6am alarm today. Still evil, still cursing it. More fiddling and trudging to the centre. We’d arranged to meet Chend and Al, who had quite helpfully saved us a place in the line for Elijah and Dom. We thought getting tickets for each other would be a good idea, so we split into two groups of 2, but the C4 staff had other ideas. So it ended up with Rhi and Chend having number 30-something for Dom, and I had 100-something. Our Elijah tickets were 200-something.

When it came to meeting Dom we thought I wouldn’t get in with Chend and Rhi, but I managed to blag my way in. He was sooooo nice, and 10 times better looking than on-screen. Even though he was already pretty to begin with. Richenda asked him to marry her, which he said he’d think about. He also said she had a crazy-cool name. But we all got hugs and pictures with him. I didn’t want to let go, and quite freely told him that, to which his reply was, “You’re gonna have to. We’re not Siamese twins, I’m afraid.” He signed his pics: “[insert name here], Be Merry, Love Dom Monaghan. xxx”. Although looking back at the pics we decided it looked more like Gay Monaghan, because he does his D’s backwards.

Richenda had decided that she wanted to meet Sean Astin and Andy Serkis, so we went to get tickets for them. After that we were stood in John Lewis having a conversation about the Tweasleys. It went something like this:

Me: “Aw, the Tweasleys aren’t here today.”
Cue a Tweasley walking past.

Richenda pointed, I grabbed her arm and practically ran off after him. Which is why Richenda and I are now known as Tweasley Stalker 1 and 2 respectively. But apparently when he’d walked past he’d kind of nodded at us and said, “That’s them,” to his minder dude. What?! What have we done?! (Note from Rhi: This was before the stalking)

Andy Serkis was up next. And due to our insane madness, Richenda, Rhi and I decided to sing Gollum’s “Rock and Pool” song while we were waiting in the queue. Our conversation when we met him went something like this:

Andy: “Was that you singing the Gollum song just then?”
Us: “Yep.”
Andy: “It was really cool actually.”
Us: “Yay!”

Andy Serkis thought our singing was cool!

Onwards to Elijah Wood! Because he’d been signing all day we were told that we couldn’t have personalised autographs or pictures with him. But he was really nice to us all. Very friendly and so sweet. The eyes! And during the big fuss to get ourselves sorted before we met him, I managed to drop my camera – hopefully it’s okay! The security guard near him was mean though – practically pushing everyone through.

Thankfully, Sean Astin’s guy was much nicer, as we managed to have pictures taken with him. Lasting memory of the Sean Astin queue – stood there waiting and Richenda starts to frantically hit my arm while shouting something along the lines of, “Look! It’s Corey Feldman!” It just so happens that he’d decided to have a mini-Goonies reunion while we were there. Very cool. Both Richenda and I had our pics taken with him (Rhi is kicking herself for not asking). When I was having my pic taken, I said, “Gah! I’m too tall.” (I’m 5’11”, Sean’s not.) To which Sean’s reply was, “I would have been taller, but then the sun would have been in my eyes.” To be fair, it was pretty sunny that day.

And so the end of Sunday’s mad adventures. But despite what we’d planned, there was still more to come. We were originally scheduled to go back to Stoke on the Sunday, but after so much (i.e. not a lot really [note from Rhi: i.e. after about 2 seconds’ worth]) persuading from Richenda and Alys we decided to stay an extra day. We also decided to go and see Elijah again on the Monday – we felt a bit cheated with the previous encounter. Our rationale was that we’d have two Elijah autographs for £40 – they were selling them on the stalls for £60 each – and we might be able to get a bit of face time with him. So we decided to stay at Chend and Al’s B&B and go back on Monday instead.

My natural curiousness struck again in the taxi on the way home. I was looking at the street signs on the way back to the B&B when I noticed a sign that said 'Pippin Close'. We kid you not, we found Pippin Close! And to make it even better, the house on the end of Pippin Close had LotR posters on the walls in one of their rooms. Who reckons they moved there on purpose?