In Conference

“The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.”

Agatha Christie

By the time I turned ten years old, I’d probably attended dozens of conferences. I’d sat in countless lecture halls and stuffy seminar rooms at universities across the world, in which I had mastered the art of tuning out whatever talk or discussion was going on around me to be able to read the book tucked discreetly on my lap. As I got older, my mother would encourage me to listen – that I “might even enjoy this one” – but I rarely did. In hindsight, what I was tuning out was what my father does best, but I was more familiar with the lilt and cadence of his lecturing voice as white noise to the latest instalment of Lemony Snicket or Meg Cabot that I’d smuggled in with me.

But it’s not actually the lecture halls I remember best, but what typically followed. Because that’s what these conferences were all about when I was a child: the drinks reception. Pulpy orange juice drunk out of wine glasses and crisps snaffled from the large sharing bowls (a relic of pre-pandemic life that has absolutely gone out of fashion, probably rightly so). The tartness of the concentrated juice is such a visceral memory of that time, entwined intimately with the idea of conferences, alongside the scratchy texture of my father’s tweed jacket that often accompanied such occasions. 

It is as nostalgic in its familiarity as the smell of the anthropology department at the university where he worked, that is itself entwined with the taste of peach Volvic bought for £1 from the vending machine at the end of the hallway – frequently a consolation prize for being stuck in that building in the first place. 

Sticky wine glass in one hand, crisp crumbs in the other, I existed in my own little world around the shins of the conference-goers, some of whom noticed me, many of whom didn’t. It was a rare occurrence for there to be other children there, at least in my memory. Occasionally, the children of my father’s colleagues’ would be around, and we’d scamper away to a corner with our orange juice sloshing in the cheap glassware, along with the entire crisp bowl, if we dared. One conference we attended was in a hotel, and three of us kids ordered bottles of still water on room service. They arrived in glass bottles from a man in a waistcoat and we drank them with all the superiority and glee of it being champagne. Not one of us could have been more than nine. I’m not sure who ended up paying for that.

(And that’s to say nothing of the pinnacle of all conference locations, the one us kids all looked forward to, in which we ran wild exploring the grounds and stealing cakes from the afternoon tea cart. But those are stories for another time.)

Conferences were, in my mind, inherently academic affairs, and as I moved decidedly away from that world as I became an adult, I assumed I would never attend one again. (Ironically, among the kids, there is a clear split between those of us that moved steadfastly away from academia and those that went right back to it. Some of my fellow academics’ kids are now back at those same conferences, except now they are listening to the lectures and drinking the wine, rather than the orange juice.)

I fell into the arts and working in the industry side of film festivals and, all of a sudden, I was basically just putting on conferences. They looked a little different (less tweed), and they even sprang for real canapés (sometimes), but it wasn’t far off.

Yet despite working in that industry for a decade, I don’t think I acknowledged that that’s what they were until I finally started attending them from the other side. Until I was standing in the hall of a history museum in Stockholm, holding a glass of bubbles (had academia ever had bubbles? I wouldn’t remember, I’d still have been drinking the orange juice) and talking about story structure with a group of other writers and the fact that next week I was flying to Toronto for a film festival and—

Oh. Oh, dear. I had become my father, just in a different style jacket.

Now, that’s hyperbolic, of course because if I was my father, I’d be the one on stage giving the talks, rather than running around trying not to let imposter syndrome get the better of me as I introduce myself as a writer (really, I am, I’m just still convincing myself of that fact). If anything, my brother is actually closer to being our father (I haven’t asked him what the bubbles/wine/orange juice situation is in the video games industry). 

At the time this will publish, I’ll be at said film festival in Toronto. That film festival, in fact, that one that I worked at for so long that I feel even more the imposter returning now and declaring myself a screenwriter. It’s an opportunity to reconnect with people who knew me under my previous hat, and reintroduce myself in their minds as someone who could sell them a blockbuster hit, if you’re looking for a psychological thriller, maybe?

At the end of the day, all I have to do is talk to people. And as much as I call myself an introvert, I’m oddly good at talking to people. And a lot of that comes down to: conferences. For every moment I would remove myself from my book, or someone would glance down and notice me and my orange juice and strike up a conversation. Every dinner that followed a conference where I would sit, shoulder to shoulder with academics several times my age, and make conversation because… Well, because I was bored. And because I’d been doing it my whole life; because these kind of people were basically my extended family, in and out of our house.

One of my mother’s favourite things to say when trying to help me remember a person she’s talking about is, “they’ve been in our house.” This is not a helpful phrase; sometimes, it feels like half the world has been in our house. At least the anthropological half, plus a handful of artists and archaeologists and architects and the list goes on. 

So, if there’s one thing I can do, it’s talk to people. And when it comes to talking about my film script, good luck getting me to stop talking.

Unless you hand me a glass of orange juice under fluorescent lights in a room that smells like well-trodden industrial carpet, which might just floor me into such a state of nostalgia that I finally shut up.