Things have been quiet for me recently as I took a short holiday. I was bored of all this Caribbean business so I decided to take two rainy February weeks in rainy Manchester instead. I haven’t been back since this project started, so all of my work with Manchester had been conducted by email. This has worked rather poorly, as the university is two months (and counting) late in paying my wages. This remote control is standard practice in Academia, where fieldwork means that everyone is totally dependant on emails to get stuff done. For example, one of my two supervisors, Prof T, has been on fieldwork in a remote corner of the world since before I started my current project, so all our conversations have been via email. Similarly, my other supervisor, Dr D, left for a separate remote corner in August. Emails from my and their respective remote corners have been exchanged, routed through Manchester.

I thought it would be a waste to fly across the Atlantic and not try and sort some things out, mainly because I could really do with getting paid. It was also rather nice to catch up with friends in the office. As I was on the way out the office, following rounds of coffee drinking with friends and angry exchanges with the finance office, a colleague informed me that Prof T was in town for a week, back from his remote corner for a meeting in London, but that he had popped up to Manchester to pick up some post. I took advantage of this to introduce myself to a man who is central to my work, but who I had never met. I had a vague idea of what he looked like.

Anyway, I knocked on his office door, he did know who I was, and was happy to chat about my progress. After a while of this, there was a knock on the door, and who walks in but Dr. B, who was supposed to be thousands of miles away, rather like Prof T and I. After the initial exchanges of “what are you doing here?” and “I was about to ask you the same question!”, we settle down and had a good meeting. It was all rather bizarre, but productive. I suppose that they can’t get miffed at me for taking a holiday from fieldwork, as it would be rather hypocritical of them…

This little story might be a good opportunity to talk about how the world is shrinking, or the international lifestyles of academics, but as the event was so improbable and bizarre, it is probably best to pretend that it didn’t happen.