Waterloo60 - The Media

The dearth of posts here for the last couple of months has been the result of the somewhat frantic preparations for our Waterloo60 game to celebrate Nick and my 60th Birthdays. The game finally took place last weekend, 20-23 Aug 21. As it was the whole celebration got a little out of hand and so blogging it is going to take quite a few posts!

One reason for it ending up as more than the sum of its parts was Nick's bright idea to let the local news media know. It took a few emails but he ended up making contact with a journalist from GetSurrey/SurreyLive. She interviewed Nick and I over the phone and sent a photographer to his house on the Thursday, where we were joined by my brother Adrian, who'd painted almost half the troops, for a photoshoot and they ran an article on-line early Friday.

Nick, myself, and Adrian with some of Nick's Hussars

That was nice, but then they said they wanted to livestream the game! So another journalist turned up lunchtime on Friday. Set up was taking longer than thought (5 hours in the end!) so she had to help put the troops on the table before we could start! She interviewed the three of us, I then gave a guided tour of the tabletop battlefield and then we gave a running commentary as we went through the first few activations of the game. In the end she livestreamed for about 45 minutes and you can see the result at https://www.facebook.com/surreylivenews/videos/591607458915299.

The same photographer from Thursday night had also come down to get some "action" shots. And they all got posted up along with some more text and a 1 minute video in another article - https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/gallery/pictures-former-dorking-school-friends-21378573

What was really nice was that the first reporter then called us back up on Monday when it was all over to find out how the game went.

And finally on Thursday (yesterday) the print edition of the local paper came out, and they'd put us not only on the cover but on an inside page spread too!

Not to be outdone by all this professional video making we'd also put a camera up at the end of the room as soon as we arrived on Thursday, taking a photo a minute - so you can now see the whole 4 day event in 90 seconds - and make sure you turn the sound on!

That's enough media stuff for now, over the weekend I'll try and blog the actual game!

2 Sep Update

Seems like we were in the Daily Mirror (print edition!) last Thursday too! Unfortunately they confused Alan (who died in 2018) with my brother (still very much alive) in the story and caption.