The Christchurch Chapter

The above illustration from Garry Jackson (published in RTP! #2, December 1997) depicts the recently reborn Christchurch Chapter as it was at that point in time. Starting clockwise from the top right are; Garry Jackson (at that point living in Queenstown and thus not-quite-yet a member of the Chapter, although within a year or so he would be), Alexander Ballingall (current editor of RTP!), Jonathan Park (editor of the defunct Telos fanzine and co-editor of the fanzine/blog Zeus Plug/Zeus Blog), Hayden Edwards, James Gibbons, Wade Campbell (co-founder of RTP!), Matt Kamstra (co-founder of RTP!), Philip J Gray, and Graham Muir (creator of the TARDIS Tales).

The start of the newly regenerated Chapter is described here, the local Chapter seemingly dying away around 1993/94 and the mini-con CyberCon. Thus the new Chapter officially turned ten last year in May! Since then people have come and gone, the Chapter remaining roughly at the same number of people this entire decade of time (hovering as it does at meetings between six to fifteen people attending). And the format had remained equally the same as well, following the usual pattern of:

Junk food & carbonated drinks
DVDs are put on that nobody watches (unless there is something to laugh at!)
Long and loud conversations about anything and everything
An outing to a local shopping mall

In the end the meetings of the Christchurch Chapter are more a social occasion than anything else, although the advent of the new series has meant that things may change a little due to the arrival of new, younger fans (the average of the Chapter today, excluding new, younger fans fans is around 27 years of age) who are more interested in simply watching the new episodes than gas-bagging.