This week’s column reaches you from an obscure corner of North America, on the kind of isolated campus usually seen only on the news, in the yellow-and-black-taped aftermath of a high-school massacre.
But hey, it’s work, not pleasure, which under the circumstances is no bad thing. Academics go to conferences to maintain the illusion that we are all in it for the shared advancement of knowledge. It isn’t really about the travelling. Occasionally you get lucky with the destination. More often than not, the promise of heavy subsidies combines with the fear of indifferent delegates succumbing to the delights of tourism to make organisers only too happy to opt for the middle of nowhere. Which doesn’t stop the intrepid lover of knowledge from flying out in a haze of optimism, armed only with a wallet full of business cards and the conviction that there must be something worth seeing once you get there.
Then you get there. Hit with the discovery that an expenses-freeze has caused the no-show of everyone you wanted to meet, you spend most of the day hanging out in the coffee shop making grudging small-talk with colleagues. The things you skip turn out to be the best by a mile, which merely adds to the malaise.
But things start getting better. On a scheduled trip to the local museum – the kind you last visited at school, with a gift shop full of dinosaurs notably absent from the exhibitions – you find yourself next to a Scandanavian more entertainingly full of self-loathing than you are. The next day, he sits even more deliberately alone than usual, leaving you a space that would have remained vacant anyway. Despite a deep-seated suspicion of being seen to be networking, a third person joins you and the warm feeling of nascent complicity gradually spills over into conversation. It turns out you all secretly liked each others’ papers. By the evening, everyone has banded together cynically but rapturously to deride a random common enemy, say the nearby town or the extortionate caterering.
The most depressing thing about conferences is that it takes you until the penultimate day to realise that they are actually quite good. As you swap cards one final time, your eyes meet in an awkward non-moment that says it all. The misery of existence returns and will remain until the same time next year.
