The cashless society

I spent most of the last week in Stockholm at an anthropology conference. It was the first time I have ever been to a foreign country and not bothered to take out any of the local currency in cash. A few days before leaving for Sweden I had read that paying digitally was becoming such a part of life that people in Sweden have even begun paying with their digits themselves, though implants in their hands https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/sj-rail-train-tickets-hand-implant-microchip-biometric-sweden-a7793641.html.

I bought a ticket on the bus from the airport with my credit card, the same with good in the supermarket, and drinks at a restaurant. Not that different from the UK perhaps, though I doubt that I could have paid directly on the bus with a credit card in the UK. It was on the bus that I found the lack of acceptance of cash became slightly problematic, myself and two friends had to take a ten to fifteen minute walk to the nearest metro station from the university to be buy a bus ticket to be able to board a bus, since tickets could not be bought on or anywhere near the bus in any form (cash or otherwise). 

When I spoke to Swedes about the cashless economy they expressed a mixture of irritation at the difficulty of disposing of cash and suspicion of the reasons for why cash was being phased out. A Swedish friend told me that after friends of hers visiting Sweden had left Swedish Krona with her she had had great difficulty finding anywhere to spend them because even bars and restaurants that she went to now accepted only electronic payment. After buying some sweets from a stall on the street, and paying with my credit card (which would be slightly unusual in the UK) I asked the stall owner how long it had been that Sweden had been almost cashless. She said that this had come in in the last couple of years, and was suspicious of the reasons why. "It's the state. The government wants to control everybody, to know what everybody is doing and where they are going", she told me. "They know where you park your car, if you go to the cinema, if I go to visit my boyfriend, they know everything about you."

After this I had a brief walk of the Old Town, during which I stood for ten minutes listening to an excellent jazz trio busking. Though they received a few coins from passers by (not nearly as much as their performance warranted), I wondered whether they ought to invest in a card reader for the convenience of modern Swedes. (They could take a leaf out of the book of this London beggar http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2911249/Beggar-rakes-cash-outside-swanky-Mayfair-restaurant-using-chip-pin-machine-spends-holidays-iPad-whinges-Cowell-gave-20.html.)

On the way back to my hostel to pick up my suitcase before taking my flight back to the UK in one of the main streets in the centre of Stockholm I passed a middle-aged man listening to something on earphones and stood holding a sign which read "The state is torturing me for 5 1/2 years with remote controlled equipment in my body".  I asked the man what his story was. He told me that he had been in a dispute with some businessmen, who had then paid doctors to insert microchips into his wrists and ears and that these doctors were screaming at him, directly into his ears.
This reminded me of the story a friend had told me about how he had once got an ant stuck in his head after it had crawled in while he had been asleep on the grass. He could hear footsteps inside his head and he was sure that this was how people went mad. He eventually got it out by tipping his head to one side and banging the other ear until the ant had had enough and walked out the other side.
Back to the man in the street with the sign, he had a paper cup by his feet, presumably in the hope that passers-by would give him money (it wasn't clear to me from my conversation with him how this would have helped him cope with the problem of the screaming in his ears), but Sweden being a cashless society I didn't have any to give him. I wished him well, and was on my way.

A tremendous presence of evil

The other day, feeling like going for a walk, I walked up the hill
behind my house. On the edge of the small wood I got talking to an
old gentleman who was coming down quickly through the wood.
We got talking for about 15 minutes, during which he I said that I
liked to come up here every now and then, and he asked me if I had
ever come up here at dusk in the summer. I told him that I may have
done, but I wasn’t sure.
He told me that he had been up there once at dusk in the summer
and felt a tremendous presence of evil, and had to run out of there
quickly. He later remarked on this to a man who lives in a cottage
down the hill, who said it was funny that he should say that because
he himself had been up the hill at night with his dog, and though he
hadn’t actually felt anything himself, all of the hairs on the dog’s head
had stood on end.  We talked some more, during which the man told
me that he had lived in various places in St Andrews over his lifetime
always on the edge of town, because the edge of St Andrews kept
getting further away. He told me that when he was a boy anyone on
the wrong side of the Kinnesburn was not considered to live in
St Andrews. He also told me that in 1959 his grandmother paid a rent
of 50p and found even that a difficult amount to manage. He said
people should be grateful with the welfare system that exists today.

As he was about to leave I asked what had happened in the past up
here. He said he didn’t know, he had just felt a tremendous presence
of evil. I had had my back to the wood all the time we were talking.
When he went down the hill, I turned around and walked into the
wood. I hadn’t taken more than 10 steps in when I turned around and
ran straight out again! I then had to slow down and stop running to
make sure he didn't see my about turn.

Bless you and a problematic eternity

I'm in Warsaw for a conference.

Walking down one of the main streets in the city I was accosted by a blond woman carrying a book. I had tried to walk around her but there hadn't been enough space and once she said hello to me I knew I was done for, she had reeled me in. Being the friendly sort, I just had to say hello back, and get into the inevitable conversation. She hadn't actually said hello in English, but in Polish. This was within my limited Polish so I replied within the same. When I told her (in Polish) that I didn't understand (this was one of the few phrases I have learned), she asked me if I spoke English. After asking me where I am from, and telling me that she was from the US (which I had already guessed), she asked me what I knew about the Mormons. I was about to reply not much, but thought for a second and replied with what I did know.

"What I know about the Mormons is that they believe that when someone dies they are reunited with all their family members throughout their life..." I paused, and looked at her. She gave me a look that seemed to indicate that she was happy that I had understood a fundamental Mormon belief already.

"...but then I wonder, what happens when a man has had more than one wife and the wives wouldn't get on, say he has divorced one wife, or the first one died... or he just had a bad relationship with his wife and was forced to spend the rest of eternity with her... it seems a bit problematic to me."

She was smiling broadly as she had done since our conversation began. I had stumped her. "Well, I don't have a specific answer to that question," she told me, disappointingly. 

After I had asked her how long she had been in Poland for and why she was here (she's a missionary and they just sent her here... and she seemed pretty happy with the whole situation), I suddenly realised that she hadn't actually told me what Mormonism is about. So I thought I had better ask her.

However, as soon as she started telling me about this guy Joseph Smith, who had had a conversation with God in New York, I sneezed. I sneezed just the once, but found something odd in her reaction. Or lack of it. She just kept on talking. While she was telling me about this Joseph Smith chap, all I could think about what why she hadn't stopped to say "bless you". Is this something that the Mormons don't do, I wondered? Why do they believe that one person should not bless another person? Is it because only God can bless? 

However, to avoid getting myself into a theological quagmire I simply asked her why J.Smith had built the temple out in Salt Lake City, Utah if the vision had occurred on the East Coast. I forget the reply, I was still thinking about why she hadn't blessed me. 

Foreign researchers as fat-stealers

Well, tonight felt awkward. Having arrived in La Paz two days ago I heard through Facebook about the presentation of a book about Kallawaya culture by a woman who works for one of the government ministries and who is from one of the Kallawaya communities.
It felt awkward, because of the references the author made in speech to the foreign authors who came to Kallawaya communities, putting their voice recorders in people's faces, asking questions, and expecting the locals to answer. When she referred to researchers coming from Germany and the United States and writing books and not leaving copies of their research with the Kallawayas I half expected her to point to me sitting halfway up the auditorium - and that Englishman over there. When I entered the auditorium I sat behind a friend of mine from the same community who I had got to know during my year doing fieldwork research. At one point during the speech, he turned around to me and asked me "and when are you going to present your book?". "A good question," was all I could think to reply. The author went on to say that when she, in conjunction with others who had the idea of writing the book, had sat down to look for works they could reference, they didn't have access to the work that had been written on the Kallawayas by foreign researchers. They had had to find those works in libraries in La Paz. She went on to refer to foreign researchers, who she said came to steal their knowledge, as kharisiris. Kharisiris are a type of vampire who is believed in the Andes to steal people's fat, viewed in the Andes as the vital life source.
"Why can't we write for ourselves?", she asked, "this book isn't for others, it is for ourselves, the Kallawayas". I couldn't help but reflect momentarily on the academic work, which is written about people who might never read it, for journals and read only by other academics. She went on to decry the way that Kallawaya communities were written about in terms of governing themselves through "usos y costumbres" (traditional customs). They are not "usos y costumbres", she explained, they are saberes (knowledge).
She related how she had been invited to an event in Germany to represent Bolivia, and while there had been to visit a museum exhibit of Kallawaya culture. Apparently she had asked to be able to take a photo, but had been told that she would have to pay if she wanted to take photos. "But this is my culture, these are my acsu, my clothing", she replied. She also recounted how she had been to Copacabana and had seen a photo of herself on a postcard, taken when she was younger, on sale. She asked the salesperson to give her the postcard, because that was her in the photo. There was a caption describing her as a "poor woman". Naturally, the salewoman wouldn't give her the postcard, telling her that she had had to pay for the postcards herself from the "author" of the photo. "But I am the author", she said, "I am in the photo!" reflecting on the authorial rights of the subject.
After the speech was over, I followed several others to ask the author to sign my copy of the book, and told her it was great that she had written it. She thanks me warmly for coming, and me when I would be visiting her community. Later I asked her if I had sent her a copy of my thesis, and told her I would send her a copy. "No, you still haven't", she replied (though I had given badly translated copies of my thesis to the people who had appeared in or help me the most with the research for my thesis when I visited Bolivia last year).

It was a great speech. I sat there wishing that I had brought my voice recorder with me so that I could have recorded it. It would have made great material for a journal article.    

Seating arrangements #2

As a follow up to the post I wrote in March last year http://jonicito-theowlofminerva.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/seating-arrangements.html, today in the Social Anthropology department seminar I was amused and surprised to notice the gender segregated nature of the seating arrangements in the room. Almost everyone on one side of the room was male (11 our of the 14 people sitting on that side of the room). While almost everyone sitting on the other side of the room was female (12 out of the 13 people on that side of the room). There were two people sitting in the middle at the other end of the table from the speaker, who sat contrary to this pattern, but I am discounting them because they were in the middle.

I tried to analyse why and how this seating arrangement came to be, and couldn't find a good answer. It seemed ironic that the topic of the seminar itself concerned a kind of gender segregation itself as it dealt with female Roman Catholics whose chosen role within the Catholic church had been rejected by the church itself.  

I wondered if it was anything to do with the (male) head of department sitting on what I am now thinking of as the male side of the room, and the rest of the men in the department following. I am assuming that the first men and women to sit on either sides of the room were then followed unconsciously by those that sat down afterwards according to their gender.

A nice day out

Last weekend I made another attempt at market selling. This time with even less success than the previous occasions. I didn't seem to be the only one though. There was a lady from a village the other side of Dundee who was selling wreaths of flowers who didn't seem to have much business all day, though she didn't seem too perturbed by this, and seemed to be having fun knitting despite the lack of custom.
When I went for a wander across the hall to find the bee-cushion lady who I had been placed next to on previous occasions it seemed she was also finding it heavy going. The bee-cushions themselves didn't sell as well as the prints. She told me that this was because people are less willing to pay as much for something which actually has a use.
Some people told me that they often found it difficult getting sales, and I began to wonder why they did it. When a woman from another stall selling wool products came over with her grandson in her arms and told me that she hadn't sold anything either, I asked her whether it was worth coming. Her outlook was quite sunny, much like the weather, which we both bemoaned for our lack of sales: "it's a day out" she told me. She was quite sure that if she took her family (she was with her daughter as well as grandson) on a family day out for the day they would have spent a lot more than the £25 fee for the table. In addition to the weather, she also blamed the venue, telling me that a higher class of clientèle would attend when the market was held in the local theatre.
Another lady selling £2 cards and £3 bags had made about £10 by the end of the day. She told me that when she had first started out a couple of years ago she often made even less! When I asked me why she carried out, her reply was that it was out of "stupidity".
Most of the stall-holders seemed to be in their late 40s and over, and I supposed doing this as a hobby. However, when I asked one woman who by the end of the day had literally only sold a couple of buttons if this was the case, she told me glumly that this was in fact her full time job. We commiserated, and told one another to keep going.
By the end of the day I went having sold nothing (selling wool products in April is perhaps a little optimistic), but having had a few nice chats.

Seating arrangements

Have you ever noticed how gendered seating arrangements are?

Last Thursday evening after we had been watching a film in the department library, I settled back down in my office to procrastinate over some work, when there came a knock at the door. My friend Luz, having missed her bus, asked me if I fancied a drink. As it was late, and I knew I'd be leaving soon anyway, I did the decent thing and agreed.

We popped down to The Central, and although I got the drinks for some reason I was the first to sit down, while Luz was still at the bar. I sat on the bench running alongside the window, which meant that Luz sat on the chair opposite me. For some reason instinctively I felt that I had crossed a line and acted in an ungentlemanly manner by choosing this seat rather than the chair. I asked Luz whether she minded sitting there, and whether she would prefer to sit on the (more comfortable) bench. She was not quite indignant, but told me that it was always the women who sit on the benches and the men and on the chairs, and she saw no reason why this should be the case. I looked around the pub, and realised that she was right. In every arrangement where were a man and woman sitting together, the man was sitting on the chair and the women on the bench. I couldn't stop looking around and noticing this for the rest of the time we were sitting together in the pub.

I was reminded of this when I saw a story about controversy over the seating arrangements on the BBC breakfast sofa recently. For those of you not abreast of the story, the male host is apparently always sat to the left of the female host of viewers see them, and this implies some kind of seniority. This may be partly because the male host is often older, and I guess, more experienced. However, when a young pup of a male co-host replaced the older male presenter recently, he was still sat in the (apparently) more senior position, on the left of the screen. You can read more about that story here: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/16/bbc-breakfast-countryfile-louise-minchin-sofa-dan-walker

The Christmas market

A couple of weeks ago, I attempted, for the second time, to sell alpaca scarves made by alpaca farmers I know in Bolivia, here in St Andrews. The market was a little more successful than the first, partly because it was inside rather than in the rain, so even if no-one bought anything I nonetheless remained dry.

This time I also had company. An American friend of mine, who had previously helped me to advertise by modelling the scarves, came to keep me company. I was also surprised to know that I already knew the woman at the stall next to mine. She had been selling cushions with pictures of bees and the local towns on them at the previous market. Previously her mother had also been with her, but she had found her mother to be lacking in the wiles of market-selling (she had not given the customers enough space to look at the goods) and had let her sit this one out.

The hardest thing was to know to what extent to try to engage with potential customers - whether to allow passers by to simply peruse the stall, or to actively try to sell to them. My friend tried to make chit-chat with those glancing at the stall by asking how they were. "Don't mind her," I told one potential customer, in a vain attempt to engage her in banter. "She's American - she doesn't realise that 'how are you?' is aggressively friendly to British people. Unfortunately the customer paid no attention, and this merely resulted in a lengthy conversation with my friend about transatlantic greetings. An English friend who came to the stall confirmed that she felt 'how are you?' to be a personal question, and one that would cause her to question the motives of any stranger's inquiry into her health.

Most of the people who did engage in conversation with us, told us how nice the scarves were, but without any intention to purchase. The bee-cushion woman told us she would like to implement a compliment box - like a swear box, which people would have to pay money into every time they told her how nice her things were but without buying anything. We did in the end sell some scarves, though mostly to people we already knew at university.

We weren't, in fact, the only ones selling alpaca goods at the market, though I don't think this affected sales, as the other stall only seemed to be selling balls of wool and jewellery (the necklaces were made of alpaca wool). At one point I got talking to the woman from the stall. She was rather snobbish about the quality of her wool (and British alpacas in general) compared to those from the Andes. "It's such a shame that there are people selling alpaca wool from South America over here, when alpacas from the UK are much better quality", she told me. It was difficult to tell how she intended for me to take this. Although she was giving barbed comments in the friendliest of manners, she had the appearance of a snarling cat warning fellow felines to keep out of its territory.

What she meant by British alpacas being of superior quality, she told me, was that British alpacas are bred for purity, whereas in South America, according to her, alpacas were bred with llamas. When I was in Bolivia I had heard that this happened, but my recollection was that it was nevertheless frown upon, and those who were serious about selling the wool of their alpacas tried to ensure purity of stock.

I was reminded of when I helped my friends to skin an alpaca for the first time. When I asked why we had chosen this particular alpaca I was told that it was because it wasn't suitable to have children. Looking back, this clearly seemed an allusion to the purity of its blood, and an attempt to improve the stock, by ensuring that particular alpacas had children and others did not. When I remarked on this to a lecturer in the department at his house over lunch a few days later he pointed out, very logically, that not being suitable to have children may simply have meant that it was too old.

My experience as a market seller

So today, for what I think was only the third time in my life, I tried to sell to people in a market. The first two times had been in Bolivia and perhaps do not count for so much as I was only the assistant on both occasions.

On the first occasion I had helped Isaac Condori, the father of a friend, to sell home-made bread in the Huancasaya market on the border of Peru (Huancasaya was in Franz Tamayo, the neighbouring province to the one in which I was based for my fieldwork, Bautista Saavedra). We had had to get up at around 3am to take an open-top mini-bus from the town of Charazani to Huancasaya to be there to set up for 6am when the sun came up and the customers would begin arriving. Some of our sales seemed to be the result of long-established relationships with known customers (many of whom crossed the border from Peru - the border being the river Suches), and even those who Isaac did not have a relationship with, knew that there would be bread for sale. The bread sold like hot cakes. I enjoyed the experience, and as his assistant, Isaac was obliged to buy me lunch - as I recall, I had trout (though it seemed that he did so reluctantly, only after being reminded by the fellow sellers from Charazani that this was the expected behaviour of the trader towards his assistant.

On the second occasion, I assisted my friend Natalio from the highland community of Qullpani in selling alpaca meat at the nearby market of Patamanta (which is held on the same day at the Huancasaya market). Like Huancasaya, Patamanta is right next to the border with Peru and many of those who come to buy do so from the neighbouring country. My job was to check the weight of the alpaca meat while Natalio held it up using both his scales and the scales of the buyer. Although I didn't directly receive any meal in return that day, I had been staying at Natalio's house the previous few days and received many hearty meals, several of them using organs of the alpaca which if they were on sale in the UK I would have turned my nose up at (e.g. tripe, intestines), but due to hunger had learned to enjoy sufficiently to not to embarrass myself by refusing meals (though the alpaca bran soup which I had in one of the nearby communities of Llachuani as difficult to feign enjoyment of).

There were several alpaca-herding families, who I spent time with during my fieldwork, not just in the Aymara-speaking highland communities of Qullpani and Llachuani, but also a family in the upper valley (around 3,900 metres in altitude) community of Moyapampa. This was the family of Petrona Flores Mamani, who I had got to know through the Kallawaya autonomy assembly and with whose family I ended up spending time with for periods throughout my fieldwork. During my time with them I would help them planting in the fields, herding their alpacas - and once, in skinning an alpaca. Petrona's family had a loom in their house and made alpaca-wool scarves at home, which Petrona would take to La Paz and try to sell. I bought a scarf from them in my first week of fieldwork, which served me well, and several more in my last week which I took back to the UK with me and gave to friends and relatives as presents.

After I had been back in the UK for around a year I managed to find Petrona and her daughters on facebook. It wasn't long before one of Petrona's daughters began trying to persuade me to try to sell in the UK the garments which her family makes. After a year trying get s student society interested in taking this on as a project, and eventually realising this was a dead end,  I decided that I would take the bull by the horns and put my own money in to try to sell them myself. The first package came over in May in the luggage of a friend who was travelling from Bolivia. I thought it would be difficult to sell any at all in the summer, but was pleasantly surprised when, after informing the Collaborative Anthropology group about the scarves two lecturers and one fellow Phd student bought scarves straight away. One of the lecturers went crazy for them, emailing me to bring the scarves to her office immediately, as soon as she found out about them. She was almost certainly more excited than I had ever seen a fellow human being on the topic of scarves. "Do you know how many bags of scarves, I have?" she asked me. "Eleven bags of scarves! And those are just the ones I had to give to charity because I had too many scarves" (I am paraphrasing a little). My first thought was that she clearly had a problem which could not solved by the purchase of more scarves. To my good fortune, however, her analysis did not concur with mine, and not only purchased some for herself and as gifts, but filled my head with grand dreams of opening an emporium of alpaca scarves.

As Christmas began approaching in November I asked Petrona to send more scarves, and this time hats, and at the same time asked the Social Anthropology school President to inform the undergrads. When she told me she had forwarded an email from me to 588 undergraduate students I expected myself to be overwhelmed. But so far the deluge has been... slow. By then I had already paid a deposit on a space to sell the scarves at a market in a local school in St Andrews, on what turned out to be St Andrews day. I had been worried about not having enough stock after selling some to students, but luckily another box arrived three days before the market. On the day it was bleak. Windy and rainy and I had to carry a card table with my to the venue in addition to the hats and scarves.

When I arrived, I had been unable to find the organiser of the market, Janet, who I assumed would tell me where my pitch would be for the day, but I was advised that it didn't matter, and to just find a vacant spot. I set my table (a small card table which I had been able to carry from home) up between two ladies sell what I think I could categorise as knick-knacks, and they were to be my companions for the afternoon (or from 11-4, the hours of the market). The lady of one side was selling scented textiles made into the shape of animals (dogs, mostly), other ornaments shaped to appear like ducks, Christmas wreaths, and 1930s-style hats. The lady on the other side was selling coasters, cards and cushions imprinted with various designs. Some of the designs showed animals, such as dogs (she proclaimed at one point in the afternoon, when a dog-walker went past, that she was a dog person), and drawings of East Nuak villages and St Andrews. By far the most popular of her items, she told me, were those with the drawings of St Andrews on them, which perhaps give a sense both a sense of St Andreans pride in their town and the general perceived attractiveness of it.

They were both very friendly towards me and the lady on one side gave me not just two cups of tea to keep me warm, but also a (small) free gift when I took an interest in the various nice smelling things she was selling. Although I felt very much like an outsider, this being my first attempt at market selling on my own and my very first in the UK,feeling like a novice surrounded by experts, my neighbours brought me into the fold. They gave me advice on the positioning of my table (that I should try to move it forward, closer to the people walking past), the presentation of my wares (that I move my (rather amateurish) sign up to make it more visible, and that I make clear that the alpaca scarves and whatnot were Bolivian. They also encouraged me as the day went on, telling me that I was gaining in confidence when I actively greeted passers-by, and tried to engage them in conversation. We were also united by our common experience of the cold.  

Before the fair I had tried to think about what I needed to make my table attractive. I printed out a photo of Petrona,which I taped to a Bolivian aguayo (for these purposes, a tablecloth). I also printed out an A4 piece of paper on which I had written in big letters "Alpaca scarves and hats". Only later did it occur to me that I needed to have written "Bolivian alpaca scarves and hats", to make clear their provenance. One thing I did not do was to write down the prices of the items. I had considered this as a possibility, but had, I think,taken the Bolivian markets as my guide. I could not recall ever seeing prices for similar items in Bolivian markets,and so decided not to attach visible prices to mine, on the basis that if someone was interested they would ask the price, and I would be perfectly open to haggling.

I sold two large scarves all day long. One to a librarian, who I recognised and who recognised me, and who it was therefore easy to strike up a conversation with, and another to a friend from the Social Anthropology department who I could have sold to in the department anyway. The ladies at the stalls either side of mine put the blame largely on my lack of visible pricing for my lack of success. When Janet appeared late in the day she also remarked that this may have been a factor. She told me that women like to see prices or they won't take an interest in the products. Men might approach to ask, but women would not. She was probably right. I think only one or two people approached to ask about prices. Others I volunteered the prices to myself.

The size and location of the table may also have been a factor. The fact that I had such a small table meant that if I was near the table then nobody could approach to look at the items without my presence. I tried moving the table forward and backwards and backwards, and eventually put an aguayo down on the floor in front of the table with scarves on to spread things about a bit. The fact that it was cold and rainy outside - and we were outside ourselves in the courtyard of a school, did not help to attract customers, and it not until I had been at the stall for a good two hours that there was much footfall at all.

It's a learning process though... I will be attempting it again in two week's time, thankfully next time inside in a place where they will give me a table.

Midsummer

So last weekend a terrorism-obsessed Zebedi (obviously this isn't his real name, but having found it amusing to change the names of my friends in my last post I thought I'd try it in this one too) came to visit for the weekend. Why Zebedi finds terrorism so fascinating I can't fathom, but it has led him to study for a master's degree in the subject and next year will be embarking on a Phd in the same in our very own venerable institution. Somehow he manages to bring the subject of any conversation round to the subject of terrorism, which you would think might kill the atmosphere somewhat, and very often you would be right.

Last night I joined him and others at the postgraduate bonfire on the beach, where he was smoking shisha with Syrian friends from the International Relations department, many of whom were studying subjects as depressing as he. I had brought along a friend who studies physics and told him about how the first I had been introduced to one of Zebedi's colleagues, humpty-dumpty (yep, I can easily amuse myself with this name-changing lark) I had thought he had told me that he was studying tourism. To be precise I seem to recall that I heard him tell me that he was studying how people became radicalised into tourism in Syria. You can imagine that I wondered firstly about what it meant to be radicalised into tourism, and secondly what would possess tourists to visit Syria these days. When I related this story to Zebedi he told me that there was such a thing as "jihadi tourism", by which people went to went, had a holiday and went home again. I marvelled at his gift of word association.

It was at this point that the police arrived and asked what our group was smoking. The owner of the shisha pipes (I presume they have another name, but hey, I'm not going to look it up) told them - I presume truthfully - that it was flavoured tobacco, and invited the police to try for themselves. They of course declined. The spoilsports. This rather reminded me of the time when, at around the age of seventeen I was returning home from midnight ten-pin bowling. For some reason at the weekends, with friends I had taken the habit of going bowling in Basildon from midnight. Quite why we chose this hour I forget. I presume for no other reason that it was cheap. Our car was stopped by the police around the local shopping centre after 2am. I think they may have been looking for drugs. Quite why they thought that we might have drugs with us I am not sure, because they couldn't possibly have spotted us calling at the petrol station to buy nothing other than biscuits. Anyway, the policeman asks us all to get out of the car, checks in the bowling balls, and then sees what looks like a gun in the side of the car door on the drivers side. My friend hastily tells him that is is cigarette lighter (it was). "How does it work?" the policeman asks him, to which the reply obviously was "you pull the trigger". I forget which of them demonstrated that it was indeed a cigarette lighter. Sometimes friends can have pretty idiotic cigarette lighters.

Braemar

Last weekend I took a trip wit three Spanish friends to Braemar, in the highlands, about two hours from St Andrews by car. To be a tad more specific, Braemar is in the Cairngorms. The idea of taking a walking trip this weekend had first been proposed a couple of weeks ago, and I had at first had my doubts about going. The original idea had been to visit Ben Nevis, but the idea had been to go for an entire weekend and leave Friday afternoon, but I didn't feel I could afford to take what would be two and a half days away from writing my thesis. Ben Nevis incidentally, was the only mountain I could think of when asked by a Kallawaya friend, who was at that moment conducting a spiritual healing ritual for me, for the names of sacred mountains where I am from (because offerings were about to be made to the local mountain deities, and in addition one offering would be made to my own sacred mountain). Obviously, then, as my sacred mountain I ought to visit it when less weighed down by the cares of my thesis, and able to pay it due reverence and attention. This trip was only a little over a day, and I thought it a realistic amount of time to take away from the PhD to recharge the batteries and whatnot.

The trip started uneventfully. As is customary in these circumstances, I left the house in a hurry, about 5 minutes after I was supposed to meet my friends outside TESCO, and jogged quite a bit of what is usually a 20 minute walk. My friend Josep (I may or may not have changed his name) and I met inside said supermarket. He was paying for his goods as I entered. After he showed me what he had bought, and indicated to me that these were to share, I then proceeded to duplicate most of his own items. Thus I met Josep outside and we compared the week's worth of food we had bought between us for our day trip. As we stood where the Romanian Big Issue lady usually sits, and who I usually pretend not to notice, but who when I do buy a copy of her magazine suddenly attempting to talk to like a long-long friend, the TESCO lorry pulled up with supplies for the store. As we continued to wait, and made sure to get out the way, whilst trollies of toilet paper passed us, we amused ourselves by identifying places on the British food map on the side of the lorry. Cornwall was a cornish pasty, this made sense. Ireland was an Ireland represented by a lot of meat, but no fish (the only fish was in the highlands of Scotland, presumably a Salmon), we thought this odd. "Where are you from?" Josep asked me. "I'm from... onion". "Is Essex famous for onions?" Josep asked me. I racked my brains. Essex was (in)famous for many things, but to the best of my knowledge, onions wasn't one of them. St Andrews, in case you were wondering, or rather, the East Coast of Scotland roughly equating Fife, was represented by biscuits. After we had examined much of the British Isles in this way, Butterfly and Obama (I may or may not have changed their names) arrived to meet us, and we were on our way, on our way to salmon!

Despite my three fellow adventurers being native Spanish speakers and myself being fluent in the language, they proceeded to speak in English both to me and between themselves. I wondered how long this would last if I didn't say anything. I didn't say anything, and it last the whole car journey. Even after I spoke to them in Spanish once we had arrived they continued almost entirely to speak to one another in English, so I concluded they just enjoyed speaking English. At one point during the journey, Obama, who was driving, asked me were I was from. "Onions" I replied, and Josep and I laughed.

When in the hostel, we had a light supper of bread, ham, cheese, liver, and various biscuits, after which Josep, Obama and I felt the need for a short walk. We wandered around what seemed to be a Swiss ghost town. Not a car passed us. Many of said ghosts were probably haunting the shop entirely selling things made from deer antlers. Whilst Josep and Obama went on to discover the delights of a local tavern, I made my way back to the hostel, to read and doodle in the half-light, and then attempt (for an annoyingly fruitless length of time) to sleep. The lack of fruit was not a facto in my sleep, however, but rather the conversation between one snorer and another across the room between around 12am and 1.30am. The conversation may well have continued after that, but eventually I managed to count enough sheep not to notice.

In the morning, after showering, I met my friends downstairs, and we embarked on our morning feast. Butterfly asked me in Spanish how I slept, to which I told her in Spanish that I didn't sleep very well because of all of the people yawning. I think you want to say "snoring" instead of "yawning", she told me in Spanish. I was nonchalant enough in response, I think, to show that I didn't care about making the odd mistake, that yawning and snowing are basically the same anyway, and so on and so forth, whilst inwardly cursing myself for making myself look like someone who couldn't tell the difference between yawning and snoring. Obama (who I had met for the first time) asked me in Spanish how much I could understand. "Just, so-so?" he ventured himself. Inwardly outraged, I replied, "No! Ninety to ninety-five per cent" This was truthful but now unconvincing.

After breakfast we made our way outside, and to our disappointment, but not a bit of shock (we been forewarned by the weather forecast the day a few days previously), found the air was wet and falling. It was only spitting, but this set the tone for the day. We drove out in Obama's car, out of town and down a country road past some deer whose adornments would no doubt eventually find their way to the shop in town, until we arrived at a car park from which we aimed to begin our journey up Ben Mcdhui, at whose summit we rather ambitiously hoped to see "The Big Grey Man" (http://www.biggreyman.co.uk/legend.html).

The walk started out well enough, and although it was windy and spitting intermittently for the first couple of hours this was nothing more than we had expected from a walk in the highlands. Once we had started walking our names became Frodo, Sam, and those other two that nobody remembers - we settled on Bilbo as a third, even though he doesn't travel them on their adventure. We walked for several hours in a valley, with mountains either side of us looking for the path on our set of directions up the mountain, and avoiding the puddles as best as we could. After five hours of walking we were drenched and had still not found the path. We realised that we had gone too far. By now, however, we were so wet we just wanted to return, and so gave up the possibility of seeing the Big Grey Man, and had to return without the ring. It was a long walk back with wet feet, longer than we had remembered walking on our way there. Every bridge we came to seemed to be the last one, only for us to pass it and come to another last bridge. By the time we got back to the car we were exhausted. I was yawning all  back to the land of biscuits.

Kukuchi

Looking back over my fieldnotes recently I was amused by the following extract:

The vocabulary of Petrona's (the woman whose family I had been staying with) little girl, Tina, seems to have expanded ever so slightly recently. Occasionally I hear her say words like mamay (mum) or tatay (dad), but 90% of what she says still consists of three words: achachi (hot); kukuchi (scary thing), and zapato (shoe). The first two words are not used nearly as much as the last. She seems to be able to use the word as if it were at once a noun, verb, adjective, exclamation and every other form of grammatical form. This morning we were having soup for breakfast and she was repeating "zapato, zapato, zapato..." I decided to try to teach her a new word. "No es zapato" (it isn't a shoe), I told her, "es sopa" (it's soup). "Sopa", she replied, "sopa... to".

My efforts to expand Tina's vocabulary clearly hadn't met with success.

When reading for my thesis I came across some explanation for one of the other segments of Tina's vocabulary, kukuchi. According to Catherine Allen, in her article "Body and Soul in Quechua Thought" (1982:187), Kukuchis are "almas [souls] who, even after eight days, cannot free themselves from the dead body, and thus remain to molest the living". From Allen's description, kukuchis are disgusting, cannibalistic creatures who are especially likely to eat their closest relatives. I imagine that Petrona must have been scaring Tina with tales of kukuchis. It makes me wonder whether the reason she repeated the word so much in my presence (often, now that I think about it, whilst attempting to hide behind her mum's skirt) was that she took me as a kukuchi. She had probably even been telling Tina that if she didn't behave then I would eat her. Perhaps the reason that she was so obsessed with shoes was because she thought that she might need to run away as fast as her little legs could carry her when I became peckish for human flesh!

Collaboration

A group of us in the Social Anthropology department at St Andrews have recently started up a collaborative anthropology research group. So far we have only had one meeting in which we shared a few thoughts on what we considered collaborative about research projects we had done or had in the pipeline. I didn't feel that my own research was especially collaborative (besides being anthropology and therefore collaborative by nature), but had gone along to the meeting anyway out of interest. The extent of my collaboration at present (and the present moment is dominated by writing my thesis) is to send drafts of chapters to my informants in the field for them to read, in the hope that they would be able to provide me with useful comments on them which will help me to know whether I am on the right track. Yesterday another member of the research group told me that she thought I was very brave to do this. Instinctively, I felt both that she was right -  that I was brave in way because I felt I was taking a risk -  but that I should do it more or less without thinking in any case, more or less as a duty to my informants. I shall share here some of my musing on sharing my work with my friends in my research fieldsite in Bolivia.

The first thing is to say that to be participating in a research group concerned with collaboration at all seems to have something absurd to it, because collaboration is so inherent to the research methods of Social Anthropology. Anthropologists need to engage with people for their research. Without collaboration with the research subjects such research is generally (though I acknowledge that of course some people manage to do anthropological research in archives where the subjects of their research have limited ability, to say the least, to engage with the researcher). Engaging in non-collaborative research would have conceivably meant conducting research in secret without permission. But I suppose the question of my permission to do research is one of the reasons I feel compelled to share with people where I can now while I am still writing up my thesis. Even when we as anthropologists have got permission to conduct research, how aware are the participants in this research of how they are going to be portrayed in our writing? Even despite being aware of what it is that we are researching, seeing us take notes on everything, they could still be surprised that we have picked up on a particular utterance. Even though I have made pains to portray none of my informants in such a way that would give offence, I still wonder whether a person may object that I had taken a remark out of context, or worse object to being referred to in my research at all.

One of the main reasons for sharing my writing with the subjects of my research though of course is because I would like to receive comments back. If memory serves me right I have sent chapters of my thesis out to four different people who I knew to varying degrees (certainly I knew three of them quite well). I sent the chapter drafts with the utmost trepidation at what they would think of them. Two of them had asked for me to send chapters, the other two I had sent the chapters to in a more unsolicited fashion simply because they were personally protagonists themselves in these chapters. Frustratingly, three of them have barely given me any comments whatsoever on the chapters that I have sent them. I wondered at their lack of response. I wondered whether they may have taken offence to something. I wondered whether they had even read the drafts.

The one man who has given me comments on my work is my compadre, Feliciano. I probably mention Feliciano in every one of my chapters, I spent quite a lot of time with him during my fieldwork, and conversations with him guided the direction of my thesis. When I met Feliciano I felt like he was a godsend. He always had time to explain to me the history of the province (and his part in it), and to help me to join the dots a little in my research by suggesting to me other people I should talk to in other communities (I would often generally myself to them by telling them that Feliciano had suggested I look them up). He wasn't the only one who did this, though he more than anyone had a hand in directly my research in particular directions whilst I was still in the field. This, for me is collaboration in Anthropology. We also discussed working on a book together as a potential joint project.

The collaborative aspect to my research has at times led me to feel a sense of guilt that I was using the knowledge of others to further my academic career. At times this point would be made to me by others in my fieldwork. There are moments I remember when I would be enjoying the company of friends in the field and then would take out my notebook to note down something interesting that they had said, and would see their discomfort. Worse, I might ask to take a photo, and would be surprised to be told - sometimes by someone I was friendly with - that I should pay (this was infrequent, but not uncommon) because I would use it in my thesis and therefore make money from it myself. At the time I laughed at the idea - writing up seemed so far off - but now as I put those photos in my thesis I feel I understand. The Kallawayas are used to anthropologists showing up periodically, staying a while, a year or two, perhaps returning, and making academic careers from writing about aspects of their culture. It was made clear to me (even before I met the Kallawayas) that many of them view the anthropologists who have worked in Kallawaya communities in a particularly negative light. They seem to regard anthropologists as engaging in a kind of intellectual or cultural theft. This has contributed to my own sense of guilt regarding my use of the material I had gathered from fieldwork. In the Andes the concept of ayni (reciprocity) is important in all aspects of life. It has been expressed to me by people in met in my fieldwork that through my research I was "taking" something, and that I had to give something back. I feel that debt as something which somehow, at some point I have to repay.

Once I returned to the university the collaborative aspect soon felt lost for me. All I had were my notes. I think it took me six months to write anything decent because of the sense of academic guilt which I felt that I had left those collaborative relationships and was taking advantage of the material gathered in fieldwork to write my thesis for what felt like my own benefit. I tried calling several friends I had met in fieldwork and found it difficult to get through to them, and soon lost touch. However, after a year back at university I managed to acquire Feliciano's phone number and was able to send him drafts of my chapters to look at. I feel like I am sending a treasured pet out into the wild to fend for itself when I send him the drafts to read. Although he has now seen two chapters and a paper which I have written, and given me positive feedback on them, I still feel an enormous sense of trepidation at sending Feliciano translations of the next chapters. What happens if he doesn't like or disagrees with a chapter, and I am left wondering whether I should re-write aspects? Perhaps that is why it is brave!

The awkwardness of meeting someone unexpectedly

Last week, as I was idling around Boots looking for some presents for my mum for Christmas, I got a phonecall from my office-mate, asking me to do her a favour. She was calling me from Poland. It turned out that all of her housemates had left for the winter and the last one to leave the house had taken the back door key with them, but without securing the house first. She asked me if I would go to her house and lock the back door. Naturally, I assented, and gave her my address for her housemate to send me the key. I then went back to shopping for the foundation cream (for face) which my sister had suggested that I buy my mum. After telling the shop assistant what I was looking for, she showed me a dazzling array of options, and rather optimistically, it seemed to me, expected me to know which one my mum would prefer colour-wise. I took a wild stab in the dark and when it came to giving her the present it turned out to be a lucky guess.

The next day the key arrived in the post. I walked to my office-mate's house, let myself in through the back gate, and then in through the back door, as she suggested, and then locked and unlocked the door just to make sure that I was in the right house. Then I looked around me. I was unprepared for the mess I was surrounded by in the kitchen. There were piles  of empty pizza boxes on the table, and a load of oven chips uneaten on hob. I was surprised because I had been told that the house was empty. I felt like one of the three bears having come in to find goldilocks having left the house in a state. Curious as to whether the other communal areas were such a mess I ventured further in the house, and found myself walking up the stairs. As I reached the top of the staircase I was stunned to find a door open in front of me and someone I knew (rather vaguely) come out. I had been told before by my office-mate that he had been staying in the house and sleeping on the sofa, but had naturally assumed that he had left for Christmas. Not so. He looked surprised. I explained quickly, that my office-mate had asked me to come and lock the back door, as though I was giving an alibi for a crime I was in the act of committing. "I thought the house was empty". "Yeah", he told me, "I didn't want to leave with the house unsecured". I gave him the keys. "You'd better leave them somewhere obvious for her when she comes back", I told him. And with that, I left, feeling awkwardly as though I had been caught appearing to burgle the house.

The Atheist Church

A few months ago I went to visit my sister in Bristol. It was an enjoyable, though tiring trip (as it was sunny we spent quite a bit of the time walking around the city). We played scrabble with her friends, cooked and ate (well, she cooked, and I ate), and saw the charmingly quirky film The 100-year old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared.

The last day of my visit was a Sunday, and my sister had a treat in store for me. She had decided that we should pop along to the Bristol branch of The People's Assembly. I had no idea what this could be, and when I asked her for an explanation she told me that it was an 'athiest church' (but not to tell our mum that we would be going). Intrigued by this description, and even more so by my sister's injunction against familial publicity of our outing, I was keen to accompany her on what turned out to also be her first visit to site of non-religious congregation.

The first thing I was surprised to find was that the 'service' was being held in a church, which didn't strike me as a particularly atheist. We arrived, as is customary when our family attends church, fifteen minutes late. Atheist or religious, we certainly weren't going to break the long tradition of late church attendance! We arrived then, as a woman was stood in front of the assembled congregation just finishing reading a passage from a book. Thus far, so much like regular church, I thought to myself. I later learned that the book was Little House on the Prairie. This was followed by some teenagers who told us about the campaign which they had been successfully waging to increase awareness of FGM in institutions, particularly schools, in Bristol. The 'atheist church' line, although amusing did not at this point strike me as a particularly relevant tag at this point, though when the girls sat down and we all got up to sing, I could suddenly see why the comparison might be made. The song was Bob Dylan's The times they are a changin. The congregation sang with gusto. Change, it turned out was the theme of today's meeting. After the sing-a-long we were told that we would have five minuted to mingle with others in the congregation, to talk to people we had never met before (in my case everyone bar my sister), and that we should tell them about a change we had made in the last year, and a change that we wanted to make. I got talking to a nice chap who had, if I recall correctly, come up from Cornwall for the day. When I told him that I had come down from St Andrews he was immediately interested, as he said he had performed poetry there in the Byre theatre some years ago. It turned out that he was to be the next act on, so to speak.

I can't swing

So, back at university, and as usual I have joined various different clubs, to try various different things that I have never done before (or at least have barely tried before). In the past at uni I have joined such clubs as fencing, ten-pin bowling and the university radio station. This time I thought I'd try my hand at squash, and as well as joining the pool club, have been attended several swing dance classes. The pool club night clashes with the swing dance classes though, so as yet I haven't been. I've never been a dancer, but swing seemed like it might be fun and good exercise. Plus I felt that I had reached an acceptable level of incompetence in my attempts to learn salsa, and was thus clearly ready to move onto another dance.

My first swing taster session was of all abilities. I accompanied some of the fellow postgrads living in my building to the student union, where the event would be taking place. Half our number left as we approached the door, after deciding that the dancing looked a little too serious for them (they were there mostly for alcohol, and had come in fancy dress as 1920s gangsters, I think). Taking my life into my hands though I entered, and undeterred by my natural lack of rhythm or any ability to move in time to the music, I tried to follow the steps of the people around me. Except I wasn't following their steps. I was floundering. This was much to the exasperation of the two girls I had accompanied and who took it in turns to show me some steps. By the end - after another girl had shown me some more steps and I was feeling a little more confident, I felt ready to begin beginner's classes a couple of days later. The class started with the teachers telling everyone to "pulse". We jumped up once, landed on our feet with our knees bent, and I began to bounce up and down as I believed was expected of me. By the end of the class, after we had been shown some steps and I had danced with an array of women, I felt embarrassed by my lack of ability, and continual mistakes, but with the expectation that many of the other men probably felt the same way. Undaunted by my incompetence, I again returned to the class today. Despite lacking any ability to move in time to the music, I felt that by the end of the class I had got the hang of one or two of the steps and in the freer session at the end of the class I attempted them over and over again with every girl I danced with. I felt out of my depth but was nonetheless enjoying myself until I came to dance with a French girl, one of the girls I had accompanied to the first session. "I don't know what you're trying to do" she seemed to scream at me time after time, and in no time I was ready to leave the dance floor. I'm hoping that none of the students from my tutorial classes were learning swing, and were treated to the embarrassment of my dancing. I think I might give the pool club try next time (or maybe just get on with writing my thesis). 

The Giant and the Church

My mum regularly attends a local pentecostal church, and has done since before I was born, the village where my parents currently live having been the locality in question from around my third birthday onwards. Every Sunday that I am staying at home with them my mum asks me if I am going to attend church with her, and from a sense of guilt at the disappointed noises which follow when I say no, I sometimes acquiesce.

The church is a modest affair, the building itself being of noticeably religious orientation only because of the somewhat mutilated cross on the outside of one wall neighbouring the main road. I say mutilated because the cross was "redesigned" some years ago by a chap with an evidently avantgarde approach to traditional religious symbols, who must have thought that the traditional cross in the shape of... well, a cross was a bit old hat and returned said item to the church with one of the arms lopped off, which he had replaced by a bird of some description, which I presume to be a dove.

But I digress slightly. Where was I? Oh yes, I was about to tell you about the interior of the church. Inside the church of course, are the church-goers, which at present seem to be in almost equal measures long-term residents of the village, recent arrivals from East London whose skin is a darker hue than is traditional in these parts, and residents of the local care home for people with various interesting disorders, such as autism and downs syndrome. My brother being one of the current residents, I visited the venerable institution on my return from Bolivia. My brother has a flat which is slightly detached from the main building, but which one has to access through the larger building on entering and leaving. On the way out with mum on this particular occasion a colossus bounded down the stairs, and warmly greeted myself and said parent, asking after my brother and shaking me a bit too firmly by the hand. Upon reaching the street I asked my mum if this goliath (he was comfortably seven feet tall, probably seven and a half) was an inmate or a warden, and was somewhat taken aback when she told me that he was in fact one of the inmates. I asked her what he was in for, and was told that "he has a growth problem". I thought for a moment before asking "is that it?", and my mum replied that he has been interred because of fears that he might get taken advantage of because of his height.

But anyway, back to the church. So this morning my mum and I enter the church and sit down behind the giant. I attempt to focus my sore eyes. Before leaving the house I had been staring into them with the aid of a mirror, after becoming rather fascinated with the pigmentation of and shapes within my iris, and then attempting to discover whether through prolonged gazing of this sort I'd be able to detect a dilation of my pupils. I think I may have strained my eyes in doing so, but I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that they now feel right as rain. The service took the usual form, a bit of singing, some relation from various members of the congregation about how they wish to praise and thank God for something or other that has happened to them or their relatives that week, and then pastor giving a rambling sermon. This was of course interspersed with the intake of bread and ribena and the saying of prayer. When it came to the segment of the service in which audience members share their anecdotes I was prepared - for the first time! - to share something. After listening to an old woman relate how God had enabled her - or it may have been a relative - to recover from some life-threatening illness or other, and then a teenager filling us in on a similar tale, I got up to tell the assembled masses of how pleased and thankful I was that God had, in the form of the financial advisor at the university's student services department, sent some money my way. Obviously, being English and thus having to suffer the unfortunate affliction of irony dripping from every word that I utter, this was a difficult thing to. While the previous two speakers had been holding the congregation's attention, I had been inwardly preparing myself be repeating the mantra "don't try to be funny" to myself. I've sometimes thought it surprising that Christianity ever took off at all in this country, since being religious seems to require levels of sincerity so clearly incompatible with the English psyche. Which is ironic really, since God himself is, of course, an Englishman. After I had sat down, one of the other congregation members took the floor to inform us that he didn't really have anything to say, but wanted to sing, and then began a little ditty which I had never heard before and wondered whether he was improvising. There was just time before continuing the show for my mum to step up, say she was glad that I had spoken because if I hadn't she would have told to story of my windfall herself, and then to thank God for providing the half a duck my dad had spotted in the reductions counter at the supermarket the other day.

When the sharing of personal stories was over with, and we got on with some good old singing, Goliath turned around to me and enquired as to my footballing affiliation. Upon informing him that I was a West Ham fan, he put his hand up for a high five and I winced at the force of impact as his palm hit mine. I don't know if he is a regular attendee. He would certainly be useful to have in the company should productions of the life of King David be performed.

How not to respond in a job interview

My downfall in job interviews in general that I am far too honest (a good example of this is when I was being interviewed for an Assistant Warden job at university a few years ago, and upon being asked why I was interested in the role, responded that it was because of the free accommodation). The following are some of the responses which I gave to questions in a recent interview for a job teaching English as a Foreign Language in London.

On being asked what I know about the company, I told the interviewer something like: "To be honest, I looked at the company's website when I applied for the job (a couple of weeks previously), and I don't know if I can remember anything now". Her response was "well, that's honest, I suppose". Upon realising (as the words left my mouth) that I had shot myself in the foot, I attempted to recite to her the school's social programme, which I had seen on the wall of reception on the way in. I suppose I was hoping that I'd at least get some brownie-points for short-term memory and observation skills.

She asked me what kind of a teacher I am. I told her I was a "facilitator" - the first word that entered my head, without being able to tell her what I meant by the description, and instead gibbered somewhat.

By the time she asked me to do a 5-minute demonstration lesson (which she gave me 5 minutes on my own with board pens and a piece of paper to prepare), I knew that the game was up. My mind went blank, and I spent 4 of the 5 minutes staring at the piece of paper without any idea of what I was going to do when she came back in to the room. The last minute I spent drawing a plan of town on the board, and when the interviewer returned, I proceeded to teach her an elementary level class of giving and asking for directions. It seemed to go OK, some things worked, and others I clearly could have done better, which was exactly the feedback I was given. If I was judged on the class alone then perhaps I would have been offered the job.

Before the interview was over, the interviewer had one final question for me. "Are you familiar with phonetic symbols?", she asked me. "With what?" was my devastating reply, somehow not having heard her words clearly. I don't think that then telling her that it was the way she pronounced "phonetic symbols" that was the problem helped my cause very much.

I wasn't surprised, a few days later, to receive an email telling me that "at this time [I] have not been successful in my application."

Conference

So yesterday I gave my first presentation of my research at a conference.  Writing the presentation was a great way for me to structure my own thoughts about the topic at hand into an argument, and perhaps just as importantly, to think about what I needed to present to an audience of people who had only a passing knowledge about Bolivia, in order for them to be able to understand what I was talking about.

Academic conferences are a great way to see cities around the country I might not otherwise travel to. This one was in Liverpool, and outside the conference at Liverpool University I managed to acquaint myself with the interiors of a couple of pubs. It was a three day conference, and my talk was on the last day, which was good because I got a chance to get to know my audience members before presenting my paper to them. Actually, I knew almost all of the audience members of my talk, the audience numbering only three (not including my fellow panel members). It was a slightly odd, but very stress-free way of giving a presentation, after having been rather nervous beforehand, and then spent the night before creating extra slides for my power point presentation, to find that the people listening to me would have been able to fit into the back of a taxi together.

After my presentation, I was then morally obliged to go and listen to the talks given to by the two women who had listened to me (though I would have gone anyway). After their presentation ended, we enjoyed a wine lunch which we then took with us to the following panel, and which made it rather difficult to follow the arguments of the presenters. Throughout the day - aided perhaps somewhat by the wine - I became more and more enamoured with a pretty blonde woman who had been nearly half of the audience for my presentation. Towards the end of the day, in a moment alone with her in one of the aforementioned pubs, I told her how incredibly pretty I thought she was, which she seemed to take with slight embarrassment. Five minutes later, a friend told me that the girl, in addition to being beautiful and charming, was also married. It felt like an unexpected (and unwanted) sign of my own ageing, that a woman I like is no longer unavailable merely because she has a boyfriend ('why do all the pretty girls seem to have boyfriends?' I often seem to have mused to myself), but rather because she has a husband. I'll have to start checking out women's fingers for rings, from now on, I suppose.

Time Travel

I'm now back in the UK from Bolivia and adjusting to the strangeness of life in Britain (e.g. neon lights everywhere; my first week back I waited for the bus on the wrong side of the road). While I was away in Bolivia for most of the previous eighteen months, my mum was supposed to clear out the house ready for my parents to try to move. I get back and nothing in the house has changed. My sister and I, finally fed-up with the prevaricating, decide to take matters into our own hands. Last weekend we stepped boldly into the world of the drawers in the hall; a world which, by the looks of its contents, no intrepid explorer had ventured into during the modern era. Catalogue after catalogue came tumbling out. Great Universal 1993 being the oldest. Oh, the shell suits! When we were finished, the two sets of of cheap draws were taken out into the garden and smashed up. A cathartic experience.

The next day, it was the turn of the wardrobe inside my brother's room. If the past is a foreign country, then perhaps I should have had my passport on me. Inside there were such treasures as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle kite-string, cassettes recorded at a meeting in 1982, and a 1980s style microphone. I was forced to repeatedly turn to my mum and ask her: "What is this?". At the bottom of the drawers was a West Ham United scarf knitted by my grandmother around 50 years ago, which I never remember seeing before, and which my dad said that he hadn't set eyes on for about the last 20 years. I managed to liberate many dozens of women's magazines held captive in the cupboard since the mid-90s, with one magazine (Best) having evidently been incarcerated since 1989. I was even joyously reunited with a Shoot magazine from 1988. The front cover of said magazine had the banner headline on the front cover: "Champions EVERTON", and below the title, on the right of a picture of Ian Rush playing for Juventus, we are teased by the intriguing words "Trevor Francis - Why he's angry".

Updates to follow on the rest of the de-cluttering project...