Woke up before the alarm, set for 6.45; this conference has an early start at 8.30 – you'd never catch other historians starting that early. Who said economics was the dismal science?
Was generally feeling much better than yesterday, and had an enjoyable chat about child labour over breakfast (only a historian could say that) and looked forward both to that paper, and the other panels, and my own (I know I said 'both', but I don't claim to be good with numbers despite being, obviously, fantastic at numbers).
Here are some pics from Bom Jesus, Braga. The conference took place in the buildings surrounding the church, in the same grounds (my hotel, one of the conference venues, is just visible in the bottom right-hand corner of the trees in the first photo):
(There are more of the conference itself, Bom Jesus and Braga, on my facebook page, so go there if you're interested. Not sure on privacy settings, you may need to add me as a friend)
To start the conference, there was a plenary lecture by Prof. Li Bozhong (Tsinghua University), a distinguished Chinese economic historian, followed by comments from the also distinguished Prof. Patrick O´Brien (LSE), which introduced what must be a fiery debate.
The first session proper was very enjoyable and stimulating, and there were crossovers with my own work. The second even more so, despite my expectations of it (which feared that much of it might go over my head).
By now I was really starting to enjoy the atmosphere and the surroundings, and the nature of the discussion meant I was looking forward to my paper and session.
Lunch was stupidly generous, consisting of soup, salads and pastas, plus roast veal with veg and cakes for dessert. If we're getting veal for lunch I expect nothing less than swan for dinner, and in the banquet they'll probably give us gold bricks to munch on.
As for my paper, it went well enough from my perspective. I was able to ad lib, albeit very slightly and sporadically, without completely tripping over my words too much. And the panel was very interesting.
Despite us all being, as a couple of us suspected, lumped into the 'doesn't fit into anything else' panel, the paper before mine had a lot of crossovers and I'm looking forward to discussing them further.
It was about public reception and response to the financial crisis in the Ottoman Empire in the C19th through newspapers (strangely enough, it was the second time in a row that my paper has followed one on the OE economic crisis).
We overran a little, and people were waiting to come in for the next session, but our chair said he was chairing that session also and so they could wait. But I was anxious to make my escape before the braying mob could tut me to death.
So I went for a beer on the terrace with some good company, and we compared the state and nature of academia in our various nations (Ireland, UK, and Finland).
I was thinking that us Europeans really are more alike than different, but then reconsidered and thought maybe our similarity was due to other reasons (living in modern cities? being highly educated? probably the latter. Geeks are geeks the world over. We know our kind).
There followed a reception and dinner. Buffet again; this time the hot meal was salt fish (possibly scad) and potatoes. They replenished all the food once it had run out, and bearing that in mind, see if you can guess how many different types of cake they had out on the dessert table. And they were proper, nice, home-made fare as well.*
After dinner we were sung to by the University of Minho choir. Had a nice chat with Ana from Coimbra, between Porto and Lisbon, who explained that all the universities had their own special song which everybody learned. I said we had something similar, but the songs were mainly about beer...
With the World Cup approaching football is never far from my mind. Ana in fact brought up the subject. She goes to watch Coimbra every week, and she says during these hard-pressed times the attendance is around 2-3,000.
This really puts in perspective how lucky we are in the UK that teams in the lower divisions, and even, I'd imagine, some non-league teams, enjoy those sorts of crowds.
But I did point out that it was partly because British people, myself very much included, were mainly quite stupid and couldn't handle anything more cultured than football.
You only have to consider that the discussion of tactics is seen as a geeky, almost European-boffin thing here, and the image persists of the greatest English footballers ignoring or even rejecting the idea of tactics and just being their brilliant selves. I'm thinking here of the public perception of Rooney and Gerrard.
And of course there's the 'just-lump-it-into-the-box' merchants, who stick to their long-range guns in terms of tactical nous. Though given the right opposition, long ball can effectively exploit an opposition's weakness, as Inter showed in the Champions League final. It is scary to think that Wimbledon could have won the CL; they were capable of scoring similar goals. Not Bolton though.
* The answer is 17. That's 17 different types of cake. I've tried 2. Must try harder.
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