Conference Talk
I’m currently at a conference in Sheffield in a room that is so nice and so clean that I never want to leave again. The conference itself has been really welcoming and extremely amusing so far, even when the workshop I attended on the first day was a drag. Its topic was humour, but it was executed so terribly that it hardly mattered what they said, we were having a laugh anyway. I feel kind of bad for these people, but similarly, I wonder how on earth they ended up at this conference.
To further embarrass myself, I sat down next to Simon Armitage (he was opening the conference with a poetry reading at the Winter Gardens) without having so much as a clue. I spotted an empty seat next to my supervisor on the front row, so I asked him if it was taken and he said it wasn’t, so I sat down. Suddenly he said, “Ah, shit, no, yes it is, [my wife]’s sitting here!” His wife was at that moment introducing the poet, or getting ready to, so I swapped over to the empty seat on the other side of the man I’d been sitting next do. Yes, I moved from one side of Simon Armitage to the other, and it didn’t change the fact that I had no idea I was sitting next to one of England’s most famous current poets. Oh well. He was very nice about it when I talked to him afterwards, and the reading was nothing short of brilliant, so I’m intending to read (a lot) more of his work.
I’ll actually manage to recognise the name next time ’round.