24 January 2017, morning
The hotel serves me a Swiss breakfast. It is delicately sturdy chunks of cheese, robust salami and teutonically dry bread. The ambience is fondue. Jam is available from a tap but it is clearly only there as a sop to pathetic foreigners who cannot survive being snowed in without sucrose. I then set off to survive a whole day of conference without so much as a sip of Red Bull®. This is a First, and I am proud of myself. I also chair my panel discussion with great aplomb and several bits of German-sounding padding, and we reach some brilliant conclusions, for example that IP is not sexy enough for anyone in a university to pay it attention. Because my watch is fast, I manage to draw my panel session to a very early conclusion and dismiss everyone to a premature Swiss lunch of cheese, salami and dry bread. The organisers tell me off for this. They say: You should have used a Swiss watch. They say: You could have had more time for Questions from the Floor. I pretend to be apologetic, but actually I am not at all. Questions from the Floor too often turn out to be Speeches from the Floor. Putting a question mark at the end of a monologue is just not enough to make it worth spoiling people’s lunches for. Even if the lunch is yet another thinly-disguised mountain rescue pack.
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