Cagoules, Coat Hangers and Cake - A taster of the Bloggers' Unconference

I can only give you a quick taster of what happened at yesterday's Lib Dem Voice organised Lib Dem Bloggers' Unconference as I have to vacate the laptop as my long suffering husband wishes to harvest his crops on Facebook's Farm Town. The sooner we have more than one thing in this house that connects to the internet the better. His desktop monitor has gone and while I think his time might be better spent getting a new one rather than harvesting imaginary crops, I have to be nice and share.

Anyway, it was an awesome day. It was lovely to meet Helen Duffett and Alex Foster from Lib Dem Voice for the first time as well as the Godfather of the Lib Dem Blogosphere.

The event was well worth doing. We had 2 MPs, John Barrett, whose anecdotal and often amusing blog has been praised. He hinted that he will continue it when he steps down at the election and may even get into Twitter, too.

A jet lagged but still jovial Jo Swinson came more or less straight from the UN where she'd been chairing an inter Parliamentary debate on the global economic crisis. I'll write more about that in a separate post.

Alex Foster told us how to make podcasts and made a comment about how Lib Dem activists could download them onto their ipods and listen to them while delivering leaflets. That led to the comment from Lord Bonkers that that would be "the most fun you could have with your cagoule on." My notes are unclear about exactly what it was Alex told us you could make with a coat hanger and a pair of tights, though. Maybe someone else understood it better.

One of the other major highlights of the day was the chance to interview Tavish Scott. It was good to get to see him in a relatively informal and relaxed manner and he talked a lot of good sense. I have a whole 14 pages of notes from that to make sense of, so I bet it'll be tomorrow before I manage to write that up.

The best bit, obviously, was the marvellous cakes provided by the lovely Andrew. Lemon cake, chocolate truffly things, chocolate cake, little tray bakes. Yum.

The huge disappointment was not getting to meet Charlotte, who couldn't make it due to an unfortunate problem with her internal body clock. Maybe next time.

That's it for now - hope it's given you a bit of a taster of a fabulous day. Now, off to let my husband sort out his basil.