From the Chair

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoAn early start, the sort that requires you to be decisive with yourself before you've had any real evidence that the day is worth attending. A quick round to get through first, and then straight on to the Hilton at Sentral, arriving in that slightly breathless state where you've already done half a day's work and everyone else is still queuing for coffee.

I was chairing the session before lunch. Chairing is a peculiar job. You're the least interesting person in the room by design, and your entire purpose is to make sure the interesting people run to time and don't talk over one another. Done well, nobody notices you at all. I've come to quite enjoy it — there's a craftsmanship in keeping a session moving without ever appearing to push.

And the speakers were superb. Colleagues over from Germany, France and Italy, all of them presenting work at a level that genuinely makes you sit up. World-class, and I don't reach for that phrase often — it gets thrown at anything that's merely competent. This wasn't that. It was the real article, delivered with the particular confidence of people who have lived inside a problem long enough to explain it simply.

There's also the pleasure of watching three European speakers approach the same material in unmistakably different registers. Precision, elegance, and enthusiasm respectively, and I'll leave it to the reader to assign the nationalities. Between sessions I caught up with old acquaintances — the ones you see twice a year in hotel foyers and never anywhere else, and yet somehow pick up mid-sentence from wherever you left off. These conference friendships are odd, shallow in frequency and surprisingly deep in substance.

Lunch was excellent, which matters more than organisers sometimes appreciate. A good lunch buys you a room full of people who are still awake at two o'clock. And the afternoon sessions carried on properly, which suggests somebody understood this.

By the end of it, though, I was thoroughly spent. There's a specific flavour of tiredness that comes from a full day of concentrated listening — not physical, exactly, just a sense that the part of you that processes things has quietly clocked off without telling anyone. I still had bits to finish, and I couldn't face them at any reasonable hour. They got done late, badly, and mostly by force of habit.

So I'm heading into the new week with a small deficit, and no great illusions about it. A weekend spent talking, however good the talking, is not a weekend spent resting. The mind is full and the tank isn't.

Still — better this than the alternative. A day among people doing excellent work leaves you slightly restored even as it exhausts you. You come away with things to think about, which is a decent trade for an early start and a late finish.

Rest first, though. Everything else can queue behind that.