A soaraway success

Tim:

I awoke this morning with a slight hangover, but still flush with the wild success of Shoot Up’s first ever meet up / piss up.

As advertised in those articles down the page, my esteemed co-writer Alison along with her husband Geoff ventured north of the border and braved the cold, rain and general misery to come and stay with us for the weekend and to help host Shoot Up’s planned sober, quiet and reflective meet up.

Fueled with a heady combination of mulled wine and tapas we arrived in Au Bar to really meet our first ever real-life real readers (to whom we’re not related). We quickly established that, contrary to popular belief, people you meet via the Internet are not all escaped serial killers and we settled down to a great evening of beer, wine and diabetes chat (there was also some extensive discussion about zombies, but that’s another story).

Swapping tips and experiences was extremely useful and I was really pleased to see how many lovely diabetics Edinburgh has! Hurrah! The next meet up is already being planned so watch this space!

Alison:

They came! Real people who read our blog out of choice rather than family obligation. And they were lovely. Intelligent, entertaining, fun people. We spent several happy hours drinking beer and meandering through life’s important topics – how great but chilly it is to ride the Christmas ferris wheel in the lovely city of Edinburgh; how just because Edinburgh apparently has the best diabetes care in Scotland the fact that it isn’t delivering against some of the guidelines means there’s plenty of room for improvement; how Tim has learnt to live with the fact that Katie has taken a bit of a shine to comedian Russell Howard; why our British readers seem much more reluctant than our American readers to comment on our blog;  and how to transpose music for an E flat tenor horn – at which point Tim and I were completely lost.

Pharmacist Simon thanked us diabetic types for being such a reliable income stream for professional drug pushers like him but despite much encouragement we couldn’t get him to reveal how many diabetic patients he needs to be able to afford a nice yacht.

Thanks to Tim and Katie for their wonderful hospitality – anyone who has a warm pair of slippers and a glass of port waiting for us after a long journey gets 5 stars from me!

I suspect further Edinburgh meet ups will be on the horizon, but we’re also pondering heading south to sunny Liverpool for the next meet up – could we tempt you to that?