The February Meet

This month I made it to the meetup in London, which was great because it's been a long time since I met up with the London hypnosis crowd. Far too long.

We've chosen a new venue recently and it seems that our choice is also the choice for a lot of people to meet up for a drink after work. I managed to find Ben, who had found a table and was sharing it with a nice couple of young women, and about 15 minutes later I was even able to get us some drinks. It was pretty crowded

Later on however, once the surge in work leavers was over, this began to feel a bit less mad. I was able to catch up with Ben and chat with the ladies about hypnosis, to the usual interested but wary response that a swarm of hypnotists will tend to get, and a swarm we were, well a small swarm anyway, when Chris, Darren and Pete showed up.

Sometimes attractive women in pubs are really up for trying hypnosis, but sometimes they aren't. Ben settled for getting a phone number instead.

Overall the feel of the meetup was social rather than all of us feeling the immediate intention to go forth and zap people. The general feeling was that wandering around in parks in the summer when people are lazing around in the sun is better than disturbing them over dinner, although Darren and Ben did have a go.


The only hypnosis really worth mentioning was when Darren caught me musing about the hand clasp and managed to stick my hands together, dammit! He then proceeded to stick my drink to the table and to tell me that the drinking straw was white hot and would burn when I touched it. This had a fairly interesting result, which was that I went out of my way not to touch it, even though I knew I probably wouldn't feel anything if I did. As the conversation went on, I picked up one of the menus on the table, folded it, and used it to carefully lift the straw out of my drink and discard it onto the table.

The only other thing really worth mentioning happened later when Ben was explaining something to Darren. Ben likes to go into talking about deep concepts - in this case "everything we think is a metaphor" - and Darren likes to be perplexed by such abstract wordy... ness. Chris was looking on.


Here I saw an interesting pattern of behaviour that gets repeated at all of our meets, the Ben-Chris-Darren triangle, which I like to call the "that's bollocks!" exercise. Ben (B) stands facing Darren (D), whilst Chris (C) stands between them a couple of steps back, listening to the conversation. B explains something highly conceptual and confusing to D who protests that he is just talking nonsense. C stares into middle distance with one eyebrow raised and a half smile on his face, then chuckles when he judges that the conversation between B and D has become incensed.

Good to see everyone again. Same time next month then!