Conferences

It’s EGU¹ week^a and I am sad because I am not there. I’m also relieved that I’m not there, because conferences really take it out of me. I have an ambivalent relationship with them. On the one hand, what could be more interesting and exciting than a whole week dedicated to discussing every aspect of climate science in extreme detail? Conferences are an important part of how science is done – sharing ideas and building connections across the world – and it’s hard to get ahead if you don’t attend them. On the other hand, they’re hell on earth⁰. At least they are for me.

It all starts with^-7…

The abstract

The week itself lasts several months and generally starts with the call for abstract submissions. Abstract is the perfect word because usually, the thing you would like to talk about several months from now does not yet exist. You could talk about something that definitely already exists, but that would be dull and the tiny box into which the abstract must be copied invites you to dream a rose-tinted dream of your scientific productivity. It only accepts 250 words and how much damage, you ask yourself, can one do with 250 words? On the other hand, you’re not stupid. “I’ll keep it vague,” you say to yourself. Inevitably, you forget all the times this has gone wrong before – the delayed project milestones, the missed deadlines, sickness, the unavoidable inertia of concrete reality, not to mention all the other things you said yes to – and make a promise that will haunt you for months.

“I,” you declare, “shall talk for 10 minutes on this subject which does not yet exist and this is perfectly fine because the future does not exist.” You give it a title that would shame the goblins who write clickbait headlines for a living, and hit submit.

You go back and fill in the boxes marked by a red asterisk, and hit submit again.

Then you forget all about it.

Booking travel

Travel requires forethought and organisation and anything which requires organisation drains me the way kryptonite drains superman, only I start at a much, much lower level, plus Superman can fly⁸.

There are planes and trains, taxis and buses, each with their own complicated rules and schedules and illogical pricing structures that seem to change by the hour⁴. There are hotels to be researched and maps to be consulted. When I was doing my PhD (2000ish) a friend of a friend ran a travel agency from the shed in her garden. We told her where we wanted to go and, after twenty minutes of tapping on an old keyboard, she printed off our itineraries on one of those huge old printers where you had to tear off the green-lined sheets at the perforated page breaks. You gave her a stack of money in an envelope and, a few days later, you got the tickets back in the same envelope. It was easy.

Nowadays, you can do all this online in ten minutes. However, for official travel you have to do it all through a website designed, we must assume, by someone who has never travelled and has had the concept shouted to them through the food flap in the door of the windowless room in which they were born and raised. There are many websites like this, but they are all fundamentally the same. They’re supposed to make the process easier – bringing all parts of the booking process together – but inevitably they make it almost impossible in quirky and individual ways. The search box is temperamental and will give completely different listings in response to the most minor changes in the search criteria. Puzzled as to why all the flights cost over a thousand pounds, I was told that I had to check a box to “include budget flights”. When trying to book train travel outside the UK, I was directed to call an operator who made it clear that what I was asking for was not possible. I said that was fine, I could book it myself, which of course was forbidden because the company handled all travel. It’s generally easier to google the specifics and then fish around in the system, crafting an extremely specific search query that will return precisely what you’re looking for.

The approval process required to unlock the required funds adds an extra layer of complexity. It’s there lest you take advantage of the system². The approval process itself takes so long that airlines fail, new hotel resorts are built and the host country passes through two or three successive governments each intent on tearing up as much rail infrastructure as possible. When you finally get the OK to book anything, the cheap tickets you had painstakingly researched and promised to take have gone.

You start the process all over again, but now to keep within budget, instead of taking a direct flight, you have to go via two intermediate airports (the second of which is closer to your destination than the third but less well connected), or end up with a layover in a railway siding while cattle are unloaded from your train supervised by men on horseback with rifles and a nervous air. The hotel you end up booking is now a long bus ride from the conference centre through an area that trip advisor reviews describe as “cheap and cheerful” but also “war torn” and you can’t quite decide whether they mean it, or have simply never had to take a bus before⁵. Even after all of this, the approval process – a process designed to cut waste – has added several hundred pounds to the overall cost, not counting the drain on everyone’s time, energy and goodwill.

Training

My organisation and others started, at some point, to insist that we had training to travel. Unfortunately, this didn’t cover anything useful like how to book travel on the satanic booking system, the outer limits of “carry on”, local language classes, a primer on conference etiquette, or how to fill out an expense form. In short, it did not cover those difficulties most likely to be encountered and add to the traveller’s stress. No. Training was exclusively for those rare cases when everything goes dead wrong. For everything else, you were on your own.

For most countries the training involved a short online course followed by a multiple-choice quiz. Avoid areas where tourists gather, it said, like restaurants³, hotels and airports. It didn’t say how one was meant to get to the destination, where to stay, or what to eat once you arrived. It was also silent on whether a conference centre was a “place where tourists gather”. Buses, trains and taxis were similarly proscribed. Any training that starts with the premise that you are a tourist and then says don’t be a tourist is, in my opinion, flawed.

The company that designed the training was run by people who used to work in counter intelligence and special operations, so they probably assumed it was normal to step off a fishing boat at dawn disguised as a deck-hand with $10,000 in assorted currencies concealed in the false bottom of a canvas tote bag along with vari-coloured passports in two or three false names. Speaking fisherman’s argot fluently, they would pass as a local and live off urban wildlife they trapped near the bins behind the local supermarket.

For more adventurous destinations, they offered further tiers of training which taught you how to get into and out of a car, and use a cash machine, as well as how to dodge bullets. The latter manoeuvre was demonstrated to us by a chap whose knees had seen better days, probably spent knee deep in a swamp with a blackened commando knife clenched in his teeth. He weaved back and fore heavily across the driveway and we were invited to draw a bead on him, pretending our fingers were guns. “See how difficult it is to keep your aim on him,” said the instructor as twelve fingers tracked him unerringly to the end of the road, peppering him with imaginary bullets.

I’m convinced that the training itself was some sort of psy-op intended to scare the bejesus out of us so that we would sign up for the next tier in order to regain some of the peace-of-mind, ignorance-is-bliss state we had occupied before the training started.

Writing the presentation

If the abstract is accepted then you have to, eventually, write a presentation. A week before the conference, you look at the abstract, which causes immediate panic. You’d forgotten quite how bold you had been, or simply just forgotten. Now you come to really think about it, the cleverly vague phrasing sounds terribly, unavoidably concrete like one of those monumental abstract soviet-bloc concrete sculptures that take 10 minutes to circumnavigate on foot and in which is interred one enemy of the state and two or three careless workmen.

The subsequent panic throws you into an unproductive lather which takes two days to abate. You type the title onto the first slide in an empty powerpoint presentation and then copy in the author list. After a few minutes of starting blankly at the screen, you add another line with the name of the conference and the date. That’s the third day.

The third night is spent in torment, a waking nightmare so acute that by the end of the fourth day you have two hundred slides. Something comes up on the fifth day and then its the weekend. That’s fine, you think, I’ve got a long layover in Schiphol and Madras en route to Frankfurt, I can edit it down then…

Actually travelling

Any flight bookable in the system and falling in the parameters of allowable expenditure inevitably requires travel at unsociable hours, either very early or very late, on both the outward and homeward legs, departing and arriving.

I’ve spent countless hours sitting on the tiled floor of one airport or another, watching the cleaners slowly whirr their way back and forth along the brightly-lit but empty concourse atop a brush-bottomed buggy, because one leg of my journey arrived too late, or left too early for a prompt connection. Airports never quite sleep, nor do the people in them. There’s always someone, somewhere dressed as a Star Wars extra, doing something purposeful in a high-vis jacket, or a traveller trying to eke out a corner of comfort, lying atop their luggage like some latter day pharaoh buried in an improbably expensive and well lit mausoleum, his belongings gathered around him, ready for the journey to the next life.

I was once abandoned by the Liverpool climbing club in the middle of nowhere^c. My climbing partner and I had taken rather longer on the last climb than anticipated and, by the time we got back to the bus, the bus had gone. Two other members of the club had hitched down a few days before and taken our spaces on the bus making the headcount right. As we made our way back to Liverpool, waiting for long periods at bus and rail stations, we chatted. He was studying architecture and was able to point out (without need at that point in his career for the professional defensiveness that often accompanies such sharing⁷) all the ways that architects make them purposefully uncomfortable to encourage people to move around and, more importantly, spend money. “Transitional spaces” he called them. At least, I think that was what he called them. It was a long time ago, and I was mostly plotting revenge for our abandonment, but I mentally added architects who design transitional spaces to the list.

I’ve never worked out if I prefer to travel alone or not. Each option has its cons. I know its traditional to tally cons with pros, but in a process one finds fundamentally disagreeable, the cons psychically outweigh the pros to such a degree that the addition or removal of one con is equivalent to two or three pages of pros.

On the one side, travelling alone means you have to deal with anything that happens, be it lunch, a delayed flight or a mugging. You are also more likely to be engaged in conversation by the kind of person for whom conversation is a valve for letting off peculiarly-acute internal pressures: obsessives, racists, cholerics and melancholics. My demeanour doesn’t invite conversation, and normal people – ironically, the kind of people I’d be happy chatting with – pick up on the vibes right away. The cranks don’t and polite indifference – the closest I can bring myself to telling them to get stuffed – is wholly ineffective in halting their tedious litany.

On the other side, travelling with other people means, by necessity, travelling with other people. While some of my favourite people are people – real people even – I’m very far from what you would call a people person. Every decision when travelling becomes a negotiation, a compromise or an impasse. It’s easier to pretend that you’re not travelling together, if you can manage it without hurting anyone’s feelings. One also feels obliged to make conversation. This is fine for the first five or ten minutes and in short bursts thereafter, but most trips stretch to hours. At that point, every professionally-acceptable conversational topic has been covered and as sleep deprivation kicks in one’s thoughts become dangerously wayward. Travelling in groups also has stresses as no group of people are evenly matched in their coolness vis a vis boarding calls (see also: anything that will leave whether you are on board or not), with some preferring to remain in the bar till the very last possible moment and others arriving at the gate hours before the airline staff.

The general indignities of travel are well known – shuffling de-shoed across the grubby tiles of a security screening area, unpacking your carry on luggage for an unsmiling security agent wearing rubber gloves, the lack of leg and elbow room, the seat in front of you that reclines almost into your lap, breathing recycled farts for hours on end, crawling over strangers to go to the bathroom, meals hot enough to melt titanium that taste mostly of steam, the shrewd suspicions of the border guards, the luggage conveyor beside which you stand for hours while far away on another continent entirely your luggage is being driven into a pond by a disgruntled baggage handler. The lost luggage kit they give you in lieu of your own things contains a towel so small it barely qualifies as a flannel and a t-shirt so large it almost qualifies as a robe and which, after three days in the same clothes, you are almost tempted to wear for your presentation. Jet lag.

Your presentation…

Amongst all of this, you forget you were supposed to work on your presentation¹¹.

Hotels

You make it to the hotel. Maybe there was a bus, maybe you jumped in a taxi and waved the address hopefully at a driver with whom you’d be lucky to share a common language because his wide-eyed expression suggested that you barely inhabited the same dimension. Maybe you arrived at 3 o’clock in the morning and walked because the hotel didn’t look too far from the airport on the map. Your luggage’s tiny wheels’ clicking and whirring along the pavement the only sound in an otherwise empty city, which in the absence of other people seems to have been built at a scale slightly-larger than human.

The hotel is the same hotel you have always stayed in, familiar but unmemorable. Every corridor is identical. The carpet has a distractingly bold pattern. It goes on to the vanishing point. It might go on forever. The room has: one double bed, one desk, one television, one phone, one lamp, one chair. There is a fridge and a bathroom. The bathroom has two plastic cups, upside down in plastic wrappers. It is the same wherever you are in the world. Someone somewhere is having a bad day and you can hear them through the walls, shouting or sobbing. There is a painted canvas on the wall above the bed. It has been perfectly crafted to leave almost no visual impression upon you at all. When you wake in the middle of the night, you have a moment of existential dread because the room is the mirror image of the room you stayed in last time in another city entirely, or else, in the darkness, for the same reason, you mistake the front door for the bathroom door and find yourself blinking confusedly in the bright and timeless corridor wearing nothing but a pair of cardboard slippers and a white t-shirt so large it reaches the floor and trails behind you. The door closes with a click behind you. You wander off, walk into another room, take up someone else’s life. Everything is interchangeable. Your soul is lost now traveller.

At breakfast you play spot-the-scientist. There is coffee, fruit juice^d, four kinds of cereal, yoghurt, fruit salad, twelve different varieties of thinly sliced meat, tiny bread rolls and pastries, inadequate quantities of jam and butter in individual plastic containers. For some reason a person in a uniform wants to know if you want eggs. It’s always eggs. You’re pretty sure that the guy in shorts and sandals is a scientist. You nod warily at the only other person wearing a giant white t-shirt and cardboard slippers. The woman with a poster tube and a Mac: definitely a scientist. The coffee seeps into your system. Am I a scientist you wonder? Or did I just wake up surrounded by a scientist’s things? The memories of the night are confused. There is a queue for the waffle machine which smells of seared vanilla. The clink of cutlery on china and the buzz of subdued conversation, the occasional bark of a chair dragged across the polished floor. Scientist, non-scientist, scientist, scientist.

There’s someone you know. Do you mind if they join you? No. You make careful small talk. Eating breakfast with people is such a strangely intimate act.

The conference itself

Everyone is a scientist. There are hundreds of them, thousands. You start to see people you recognise, or think you do. Your name tag reassures you in your identity amongst this sea of people, or it would if it wasn’t spelled wrong. Did someone type in ten thousand individual names you wonder? Or did I spell my own name wrong? People congregate around the coffee. You have your third cup of the day from a gigantic tureen and start to get the jitters.

It always feels overwhelming to me. When you travel, you are part of a crowd, but it’s a crowd of largely non-interacting particles. The crowd at a conference is different. You are expected to interact with people. There are people you know already, people whose talks and posters you want to see, people you’d like to talk to because you’ve worked on the same project for three years and never met, people perhaps you want to avoid. There are people who want to talk to you, who want to ask questions about what you’ve said or done and there are chance encounters.

There are screens with timetables, which after the first ten minutes are mostly lies, leading you to endless darkened meeting rooms, which do not help at all with your jet lag. The queues for everything are long, the choice of things to see is endless.

The presentation

Like the conference itself, the presentation’s full extent lasts much longer than its scheduled 10 minutes: beforehand there is the dreading and afterwards there is the reliving, the decompressing and the angst. Talks are grouped together by theme, so usually, for me, this means that I have no recollection of what is most pertinent. I don’t remember what occurred prior to my talk because of the dread and only snatches of what happened afterwards on account of the reliving and other survival-related functions. My heart rate graphed through the course of a session would resemble Mount Fuji (albeit with none of its calming aura), ramping up to an improbably high plateau as the presentation itself approaches and slowly reducing afterwards.

I have difficulty thinking and talking simultaneously. Even with moderate amounts of adrenaline in my system, I’m apt to say things I don’t mean and occasionally things that don’t mean anything at all, but I usually avoid saying anything completely unhinged. Conference levels of adrenaline make me speak in tongues. If you stopped me at any point and asked me to repeat the last sentence, I would stare at you blankly for several seconds before bursting into tears. I assume its English that I speak, but in the heat of the moment, it could be Klingon for all I know. Up to this point, no one has complained, but it would take a certain amount of bravery to approach someone who had just held forth for ten solid minutes on the subject of sea-surface temperatures in fluent Dothraki.

It’s always been this way. And, while it has got better over time, I’m still as surprised as everyone else by some of the things that come out of my mouth. It’s bad enough practicing my talk alone in the hotel room the night before – I have to cover any mirrors to avoid catching my own eye – but when faced with a roomful of people, words fail me completely. I once arrived at a session early (as instructed by the chair). The room was empty at that point, except for a few stragglers from the previous session who were still checking their emails. The chair chatted away amiably and then the lights dimmed and the session started. When it was my turn to speak I was already wound up rather tight. I reached the lectern and turned to face the audience. There were hundreds of them¹². I gripped the lectern so hard I swear the smooth wood deformed like wet clay. It’s possible my finger marks are still visible in it today.

The talk, you can practice. The questions after the talk are a different matter¹³. People can ask you anything and frequently they do. Speaking from a script is one thing, but gathering and processing verbal information and then responding intelligibly is, I find, orders of magnitude harder. When I was a PhD student, I gave a talk about a particular group of algorithms. A large bearded guy at the front was nodding the whole way through, which was nicely reassuring. At the end, he stuck his hand up and asked why I hadn’t used a particular algorithm. While part of my brain (a part unconnected from the common sense modules) was directing my mouth to form the sentence “Because it’s rubbish” another part of my brain was doing some rather more sophisticated deduction so that I uttered the sentence at the exact same time I realised that the chap was (a) the developer of the algorithm and (b) a very senior and well-respected person in the field. I think he saw the funny side, which was little consolation for me as the fires of shame crisped then consumed my eternal soul a thousand times.

Ordinarily, it’s not that bad. Chat-GPT gets a bad rap for being a fancy autocomplete, but when asked a question, I do essentially the same thing, issuing a stream of consciousness inspired by the prompt, but rapidly losing all memory of it. The most useful tip I ever received was to remember that “I don’t know” or “that’s definitely something we should look into” are perfectly acceptable alternatives to a Chat-GPT-like hallucination based on an article someone once described to me in a dream.

Afterwards – long afterwards – my long-term memory will release snippets of what happened like a blackmailer without any particular demands. Remember that time, it says, when you said east instead of west for ten whole minutes? Remember when you suggested cross-dressing instead of cross-validation as a solution for some of the more intractable problems? Good times.

The poster session

Poster sessions are less pressurised than talks. Usually, you put your poster up at a designated time, in a room with several hundred other posters, you stand beside it for a designated period of time and then you take it down to make way for the next lot of several hundred posters. The idea is that people will be able to find you at your poster so that you can maybe talk them through it, and they can ask questions, or otherwise just chat. Often though, the person presenting the poster you are interested in isn’t there. Sometimes, even the poster isn’t. I can understand why you might want to desert your post; there’s so much interesting stuff going on and there are usually many other posters to see in limited time that they and you are available.

I find posters very hard to absorb. I can read one twenty times – or at least, pass my eyes over its surface twenty times – and only the tiniest and most random slivers of information will stick. My retention is not helped by someone (I mean the poster’s author) trying hopefully, nervously to catch my eye. At that point, I might as well be staring at an empty poster board. Eventually, I cave and ask them what’s going on. What they say is usually interesting and thoughtful and sticks in my head, but the reason I don’t ask is that I generally feel compelled to ask questions afterwards, as a show of polite interest as much as anything else. If I’m bad at answering questions, I somehow manage to be even worse at asking them. Given the opportunity to interview a Nobel laureate in literature, I’d eschew such probing questions as “Where do you get your ideas from” and ask, “So, books eh?”

My favourite kind of poster is the should-have-been-a-presentation poster which consists of 15 slides printed on individual A4 sheets and stuck to the boards. The people who see posters as second place to oral presentations have always mystified me, but then I can think of few things worse than standing in front of a room full of people and saying things. That’s not the whole reason though. There’s something nice about the back and fore a poster allows, that you don’t get with an oral presentation, at least not without stretching the audience’s patience past breaking.

I once tried to read every single poster in a session at the Ocean Science conference. There were about 8000 people at the conference and hundreds of posters crammed into one corner of the hangar-sized hall¹⁴. I started early, but didn’t manage to see them all. At the end I was almost running like some character from Alice in Wonderland. People were already taking posters down. My overwhelming impression was molluscs.

Other people

I’ve heard that hell is other people, but I’ve found they’re OK in small amounts. Hell is other people and nothing else. Unfortunately, conferences provide little else. One conversation is my usual daily limit unless I know the people well. After that, I start to struggle. It helps to have scientific things to talk about because I can do that for hours. I don’t object to talking about other things, but it’s like I’m a balloon. The more I talk, the less air I have in me and once it’s gone I am a sad and pathetic thing. It’s not that scientists are difficult to talk to or dull, or draining in any particular way⁹, quite the opposite. I couldn’t stand five solid days of contact with any other group of people on the planet, family and friends mostly excepted. At the end of the day though, I want to hide away forever, but of course, one must eat…

Eating

The optimum number of people for an enjoyable eating out experience is zero and anyway, we should be avoiding restaurants because tourists gather there.

Brain overload

The first conference I ever attended as a PhD student was in the same place I was working, which is lucky because otherwise they never would have let me go. After two days though, my brain was full. I’d sat through twelve hours of interminable and mostly impenetrable talks and had already used up one notebook and the complementary conference pen. I could feel knowledge – or at least the raw stuff that time and discipline might refine into something very much like it – brimming in me. I sat there on a stuffed sofa glassy-eyed trying not to tilt my head lest some of it spilled out of my ears. The professor of our group passed by and asked me what I was doing.

“I’m full,” I said.

“Like hell you are,” he said, “Get back in there. It’s how you learn.” Then rushed off, yelling “Osmosis” over his shoulder. So, I went back in. It’s possible that I learned more, but it’s hard to say for sure. I do recall being intensely bored, which was probably a bad sign¹⁰.

My brain still gets full at conferences but I don’t get bored. Some things get absorbed, but it’s a quasi-random process, so I take lots of notes and doodle to help me focus and amuse whoever it is that’s peeking over my shoulder. The random retention isn’t helped by my quasi-random approach to which sessions I attend. There’s usually a bunch of stuff that’s essential but beyond that I like to sit in sessions about which I have zero knowledge. I find it wonderful that there are so many hard working, intelligent, enthusiastic, funny and generally fascinating people studying the most esoteric and, occasionally, important of things.

Despite this, there comes a point when I literally cannot absorb anything else and I need a break. I used to feel guilty about this, as if I were somehow short-changing whichever funding agency was footing the bill, and would sit in sessions even though I wasn’t taking anything in and maybe even leaking slightly. Nowadays, I prefer to go for a walk and come back marginally refreshed.

The aftermath, fear and self loathing

Afterwards, I oscillate. At the one extreme, I’m excited by all the cool and interesting science I’ve seen, and the brilliant people I’ve met. At the other, these exact same things depress me. It’s hard not to compare oneself unfavourably to all these brilliant people and the clever things they do. As my luggage and I part ways, perhaps permanently, at a busy terminal, as a drunken racist slurs inescapably in my ear, as I wait on the cold tiled floor of arrivals for the first coach of the day with only a giant white t-shirt to keep me warm, I reflect dismally on how little I achieve and how dull my achievements are. Mostly, its just tiredness and the boredom of being myself in public, and I know it will pass, but it’s a horrible feeling nonetheless and one that’s hard to shake.

The recovery process isn’t helped by having to produce an itemised account of everything that you spent.

The next conference

Eventually, the trauma fades, and you remember it almost fondly. You find yourself staring, with a visionary’s eye, at the abstract submission box. “250 words”, you say to yourself, “how bad could it be?”

-fin-

^-7 OK, the whole conference starts way before that if you are keen enough to organise a session or a whole conference. Improperly approached, they can ruin a whole decade.

⁰ Filling out an application once, one of the criteria was how many and what kind of presentations I’d given, including especially invited presentations. From a certain point of view therefore, a conference is where you go so people can listen to you. It all works out though because even if everyone is going for that exact reason, an unavoidable by-product is that you have to listen to what other people are saying even if it is only background noise while you check your email for the thousandth time.

¹ pronounced ee-goo despite what anyone else might tell you. AGU is ay-goo. IGU is eye-goo. You’re welcome.

² I understand that some people like to travel. I am not one of these people, but nonetheless, the people who like to travel must, under no circumstances be allowed to enjoy it at the taxpayer’s expense. It’s not written down anywhere that you can’t enjoy yourself, but every opportunity is taken to ensure that you do not⁶. In my experience, everyone tries to find a reasonable and cheap options and this is only hindered by the process designed to make cheapness mandatory.

³ If forced to go to a restaurant, one should sit with one’s back to the wall, facing the main entrance and, if possible, close to an alternative exit. While this is sound advice for the solo traveller, it is unfeasible for a group of twenty.

⁴ Someone once told me that finding an absolute provable minimum cost for any route was mathematically impossible, which took some of the pressure off.

⁵ I once shared cab with someone who had changed hotels at the last minute after reading a review that said “could not sleep because of gunfire”. Florida.

⁶ I worked briefly with a gentleman who distinguished himself by adeptly negotiating systems that reduced everyone else to tears. On one trip, he booked himself into the “presidential suite” of a hotel whose regular double rooms started at a lowly scientist’s monthly salary per night. It was a pleasant ten-minute stroll from the conference centre. Other people were saying things like, “I’m really lucky: if I get the first train from the town where my hotel is, I can get these two buses and make it in time for the end of the second session”. When asked how he did it, he just said it was green in the system so he booked it. He also put large quantities of code into version control that never worked, but was nevertheless ineradicable. It’s still there today. It will still be there when the universe ends. I am in awe of and deeply distrustful of anyone who really understands version control.

⁷ We lived next door to two very senior supermarket employees one of whom would, after several bottles of wine, draw incredibly complex diagrams to explain why supermarkets were better than all the alternatives, while his other half drank more wine and seethed amusingly. I always felt he did this more for his benefit than for mine, but if there was a lull in the conversation then he could reliably prompted to fill it by mentioning how much you liked one of the local shops.

⁸ The power of flight means his travel problems are negligible and his onesie is appropriate for all situations, so he doesn’t have to pack much at all.

⁹ Despite their depiction in popular culture.

¹⁰ The next conference was far from dull. Two aging theoreticians had a rather sad little scuffle over m-branes. At first, it wasn’t clear what was happening. A sharp question after one of the talks led to raised voices and then the question-poser stood up and walked purposefully towards the speaker. It looked like they were hugging until they both fell on their bottoms.

¹¹ You tried to work on your presentation on the plane, but the person next to you upon seeing the opening slide revealed that, in addition to their other charms, they thought that climate change was a hoax perpetrated by the UN to turn us all into communists. You were only saved from further revelations by the seat in front of you reclining and folding your laptop shut.

¹² While there were hundreds of people, I couldn’t see hundreds of faces. About half the audience had their heads down gazing intently at their laptops, like a gigantic game of Guess Who? rendered almost impossible by the fact that the majority of people present were middle-aged, white, bespectacled, bearded and slight balding in degrees whose gradations I lack the vocabulary to accurately differentiate.

¹³ Unlike most other people, the “this is more of a comment than a question” people have never really bothered me that much. At least a comment doesn’t require an answer. I admit, that my perspective on this matter might be unique.

¹⁴ It was a conference centre in Florida built to a comically grand scale. Arriving early on the first day, I wandered the almost empty halls^b. The ceiling was lost in mist, and the Earth’s curvature hid the far ends of the main corridor. The entrance to each of the poster halls was closed off by a gigantic door, in which there was a smaller door in which there was a smaller door and so on till there was a human sized door through which ten people could still have marched abreast. It swallowed the 8000 people whole. In the next titanic bay along, was the kind of conference you see in American films. It was the annual meeting of the national federation of washing machine marketers, or somesuch. They seemed to be having a great time.

^a At least it was when I started writing this. I’m not going to say what year. It’s always EGU week even if it’s not EGU EGU week, there’s always something happening somewhere, even if it’s not an EGU-scale something.

^b which is to say there were only a few hundred people there.

^c The Roaches.

^d Orange, apple, and something unidentifiable and weirdly astringent that dries your mouth out.