Fieldnotes from All Day Hey!

This morning I shook off a bit of low-level anxiety and broke a stubborn habit by going to an in-person conference in Leeds. A lovely city in the North of England I don’t get to often enough. On the train home, experiencing that peculiar mix of elation and exhaustion that arrives when the music stops and the party ends, I’m reflecting on what made it a brilliant day and why I’ve let opportunities like this pass me by recently. I’ve never been part of the crowd that somehow manages to attend every conference going, but there was a time I made it to at least one a year.What changed?I could gesture despairingly at the world at large and everything that’s happened over the last five years as the reason, and there would be truth in that. But it would let me off the hook. Somewhere along the way I lost touch with what matters and why we’re all here. The kind of blithe calculations employed by business clouded my judgement. You know, I did a cost–benefit analysis and hypothesised I could get…