Sunday 9 September 2007

I'd Forgotten......

...how the symposium works. With so many papers to fit in over the weekend, each speaker only gets around 15 minutes to introduce their paper which is then up to you to read at your leisure.

Pretty good you may think, but there are still numerous people out there who fall into the camp of 'just because they know about a subject, doesn't mean they can speak about it!' This means that you do have to overcome the urge to ignore some papers just because the speaker wasn't as easy on the ear as you'd hoped.
That may sound harsh, but unfortunately it's the way of these things...fortunately, all of the papers I heard presented today were pretty good, I'll just have to wait and see the actual texts when we get back from the weekend.

Lunch turned out to be a bit of a let down.....nothing essentially wrong with the vegetarian offering, but nothing to write home about either! It always amazes me that given the nature of the symposium and the backgrounds of those attending that the food quality isn't always taken into consideration. Not that I want to appear a food 'snob'.....far from it in fact, it's just that you might expect the meals at a food symposium to be great, or fantastic even as opposed to ones that leave large numbers of the diners wondering what it was exactly that they have just eaten?!?

This evenings meal was much better, good food with good company; a chance to catch up with some friends from Arizona and re acquaint ourselves with some contacts made a few years ago. Afterwards I had my head filled with information on early renaissance bread by a friend of ours, William although thankfully he's going to e-mail me all the details so I don't have to rely on remembering it all.

Tomorrow brings more of the same or similar before heading home to think about planning the October weekend as well as fitting in all the other stuff that we have coming up.

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