from Mannheim

I'm currently sitting up in a room in the University of Mannheim where the CA conference is being held.I've had a great deal of difficulty using the internet since I left England -today is the first day that I have been able to get online. The wireless is free in this room and I have managed to fix my computer after a few days of trying.

The conference has gone well. This morning we have attended a keynote by Lorenza Mondada. She was a fantastic speaker and did a very detailed job of analysing and describing pointing in meetings. I think that she has done the best job so far of thoroughly addressing multimodality.

I"m not presenting at this conference but it has certainly been worthwhile attending. I have met some new people who are working in the field of conversation analysis and caught up with academics from Australia. In particular, I was pleased to discover that there is a discourse analysis group that runs in Canberra. I spoke to Maurice Neville about joining that group and -in chatting- discovered that he once held a lecturing position at Charles Sturt Uni. It's a small world. After another session yesterday I met Libby who turned out to be an academic of the Albury campus of the uni. It is funny to come so far to meet people who actually live or work so close to me in Australia.

Each evening we have been out to dinner and tried out some of the local cuisine. Last night it was dinner with Gillian (Central Queensland), Maryann Theobald (QUT), Val Williams (Bristol) and Libby (CSU). We had drinks sitting outside a quaint pub in the middle of the city and then a meal after that. I went for liver dumplings and bratwurst. Delicious.

I'm leaving here tomorrow. I've had a slight change of plans. I was going to take the train back to London via Paris. However, a very nice railway ticket seller persuaded me that going via Brussels was a better option. She showed me that there was a substantial difference in the fair because going via Paris is more expensive. So, she saved me around $300, and I will still be travelling first class. I will get to London around midday and then head straight to Winchester. It's a hard life!