On Friday, I undergo the unwieldy registration process and persuade MatGB to take a new picture for my pass, because my last picture was taken in Brighton when I was both windswept and hungover, whereas today I am merely windswept. In fact this is not technically my first conference, but my only contributions to proceedings in Brighton last September were to hang around outside the conference centre leafletting and go to the Bloggers’ Drinks. I was going to call this column Diary of a Conference Virgin-sort-of-with-some-fumbling but decided that discretion should be the better part of valour.

We are joined by my friend familiar to LDV posters as Grammar Police, and we start Lib Dem-spotting in earnest. The bulky tourist families and bevies of French schoolchildren shuffling round the Albert Dock are now joined by small parties of worthy looking people clutching sheaves of paper. Sharp-suited aides (as sharp-suited as Liberal Democrats get) bark into phones and Tom Brake is reported to be sitting alone in Coffee Republic looking a little bit bored. You can’t move around the Conference Centre area without taking on at least one leaflet per minute, a thing I am happy to do partly because I feel sorry for the leafletters (we all do; it’s a leafletters’ self-made paradise) and partly because I am not organised enough to have brought a notebook.

Given this promiscuity of paper Grammar Police is intrigued by the apparent reticence of one set of leafletters who only reluctantly surrender their wares when he actually walks up to them and asks for a leaflet. It turns out to be advertising the Centre For Um’s Saturday lunchtime fringe event on social housing. We resolve to go along to see what it was they were so keen for us to avoid. Grammar finds out what Liberal Review does for a living, and warns him that any whiff of technical ability – from having seen a computer upwards, essentially – will be interpreted as a raging thirst to take on the responsibility of EARS officer for one’s local party. He is stunningly prescient, because about forty minutes later this is exactly what happens to Liberal Review.

We talk Europe. Grammar is very much in agreement with us in supporting the basic idea of an in-or-out referendum, but we all have doubts about the wisdom of the three line whip. Our favourable take is by no means universal. Yesterday evening at the Lord Rennard event we chatted to a couple of jovial eggs strongly reminiscent of John Bird and John Fortune’s Two Old Men in the Pub, one of whom was adamant that the whole thing had been an almighty cock-up. Well, partly chatted to him, partly absorbed his muttered running commentary on the evening as it proceeded. All the same, it seems to me from the conversations I’ve had and eavesdropped on that the Two Johns are in a minority. Certainly any journalist who is telling you about tumultuous mutterings in the conference bars on the subject is talking out of their fundament (not that I have any evidence that they have; just a wild stab in the dark, heaven knows).

In fact the Europe question is soon to be publicly aired because conference proper kicks off at quarter to six with welcome drinks from the sponsors, the North West Regional Development Agency. Liberal Review works in a building owned by them and is, er, not a fan, so it is all the more amusing when the lights start flickering on and off while the Chairman of the agency addresses us. “Yay!” we shout as one party, and go back to chatting amongst ourselves (well, we didn’t join the Liberal Democrats to stand around paying attention to people without being given a damned good reason to, and the agency has slipped up here by having already provided us with the free drink).

No time to waste being an individualist, however, as the Rally feat. the Cleggster is about to begin. The drinks must be downed before we are allowed through a tiny, tiny door in a huge, huge wall – the whole of the Conference Centre feels like the set of a 1960s space saga, an impression that is somehow only reinforced by the fact that part of it is still being built, and a wrong turn can take you into vast swathes of multi-storey space with great handfuls of unearthed cable dangling out of the ceiling. On the other side of the huge, huge wall is a reception hall which may be either (a) designed as an edgy, post-industrial space with exposed structural motifs or (b) unfinished. Here I say hello to Lindyloo, the London Liberal, and Mr Pack and Mr Howells who are in their techie element, gleefully playing with the large banks of electronic equipment required to record our being collectively Rallied for posterity.

Sarah Teather hosts, and takes the sting out of the dreaded Europe straight from the off – she hopes we are enjoying our free drinks; regrettably she herself has been on a three line-whip to abstain. We hear from Carol Woods, PPC for the City of Durham, on the subject of Liberal Democrat resurgence and local regeneration in Labour’s traditional heartlands. This is a theme that recurs from last night’s Liberal Discussions, and it occurs to me with full force that this focus on beating Labour is really the main event in the north – naturally as there isn’t a Tory north of the Trent. This is something I knew, but I hadn’t fully calibrated its effects on campaigning – it must make for much more focussed opposition to the party of government.

The Cleggster steps up. “Aaaaaaay!” we murmur as we clap him in. There isn’t really a good cheering word in the English language, is there? “Hurrah!” makes you sound like an extra from a Merchant Ivory film and “Bravo!” makes you sound like a Tory. Now, the only other time I have heard Nick Clegg speak was at London hustings, where I thought he was living on his nerves a little. Not this time – it was a cracker of a speech, confidently delivered and he bullishly tackled the Europe question head-on.

There were three main themes – one was the May local elections, in fact hardly anyone in a position of officialdom has stood up without mentioning them these forty-eight hours. The message from conference is that the party needs YOU, homebody! Deliver Focus this spring like you’ve never delivered it before! The second theme was radicalism in policy, forthrightness in protest against the establishment – rapidly becoming a Clegg trademark, and jolly puffed up we felt about it, I can tell you. The third, and linked, theme, was disingenuously along the lines of “doing what is right, not what is popular”.

“Take the European debate this week, for example,” orated the Cleggster.

“Yes, take it,” muttered someone behind me.

But Nick is unrepentant on this, and he put it across beautifully, getting interrupted with cheers for eschewing cynical popularism. It worked, but it won’t please everyone – James Graham is to be found irritably deconstructing the notion that the abstention was a principled decision. One thing Nick didn’t say – but Lord R did yesterday evening – is that our stance leaves us very well-positioned for the next election. The Tories will be left without standing room on Europe, having shot their rather feeble bolt over the Lisbon treaty referendum (unless they just nick our policies in the run-up to election as usual, of course).

Nick also incorporated a universal theme we can all appreciate. He wants the Liberal Democrats to address issues that matter to the people he talks to – rising fuel bills, the cost of housing, conditions in schools and hospitals. This or that reversal and Westminster may be embarrassing for a day, but it’s so much shouty plonkerism as far as the majority of the population are concerned. That must be why David Cameron is so good at it.

The toxin of Europe duly purged, we standingly ovate him out of the room, and mill around for a while collecting bloggers and other friends for some drinkies. We’re having drinks tomorrow night after the Campaign for Gender Balance awards anyway – but we figure we might as well have some tonight too. Here I meet and joyously cuddle Millennium and his daddies, and we are joined amongst others by Jon Ball, Will H, Richard G, Joe “Extra Bold” Otten (no longer in full panto make-up), Niles, the Liberal Polemicist and Duncan Borrowman, who updates me on the slithy tove Derek Conway.

We all have a splendid time with by-election statistics, beer and gossip, Millennium dubiously pokes his trunk at my Amstel but rejects it in favour of peanuts, and I hear at second hand Jo Swinson’s observation of the Tories’ latest sophisticated political stance – apparently whenever someone stands up in the Commons who doesn’t believe that the Lisbon treaty is the same as the constitution, they all make squeaky mouse noises. What very cards they are. I roll to bed late, slightly addled and laden with notes, content in the knowledge that I have done my bit for both LDV reportage and the acceptable face of binge-drinking.

Join me again later for Our Vince, Brian, Lembit, and an awful lot of chocolate and coffee.

* Alas, the virgin experience of conference is not reversing the ageing process. Will H has merely kindly pointed out that I can’t count.