Gregynog

This weekend, I participated in my first ever academic conference, and I could have done worse than the University of Wales Postgraduate Conference at the Gregynog House west by northwest of Aberystwyth. This is a remodeled country house that has all the old world charm of rural Wales.

The house is owned by Aberystwyth University and is used exclusively for these type of events. The Film, Drama, TV, Radio and Performance Studies conference was held there a few weeks prior, and the School of Dentistry were there at the same time as we were. There are a few conference rooms, an impressive library, a cafe, and hundreds of bedrooms that housed all of us.

It wasn't a particularly big conference: two panel sessions with two parallel panels per sessions and four papers per session for a total of 16 presentations. The whole shebang took around 24 hours. However, it felt like it took a lot longer.

This is mostly because Gregynog is sort of a land that time forgot. It is so far outside any recognizable town that most of my fellow presenters lost cellphone reception about twenty minutes prior to arriving. The house sits in the middle of 750 acres (1.172 square miles) of rolling hills and fields, and is surrounded by farmland for a good ten miles in any direction. When the bus left us there in the courtyard, we were literally stranded in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing except sheep and farms. This set the stage for the running gag about our lives suddenly being a horror movie. No one was to leave in anything smaller than groups of three.

The house looked really old, but in reality was remodeled to look much older. Regardless, it looked like a house that was owned by the gentry back in the day. Most walls had elaborate wall paper or paint schemes. Some rooms, like the one where we had tea, or Lizzie and Steph's bed room, was bedecked in ornately carved, dark wood paneling. It was the sort of place, as Aaron suggested, that made one look for secret passages in the walls. We may have spent some time during a tea break knocking on panels.

My room, shared with Matt from Bangor, was off the courtyard. Sadly, it looked much like any other room at any hotel that one might stay in. I was afforded the luxury of an en suite bathroom, with a full shower. It's a tough call: quaint charm or comfort. I spent some time with a group of people in one of the more majestically appointed bedrooms, and honestly I think that was enough. The next day, I liked being able to walk across the room to my large bathroom to take a shower.

The conference itself was impressive for how small a sample size it had from which to pull presenters. Everyone there was a postgraduate student in one of the former University of Wales' English Departments. The schools represented were: Bangor, Swansea and Aberystwyth. Evidently, Cardiff couldn't be bothered to join us.

I was part of the first panel that included Jamie and Ollie's presentation on metanyms and George Saunder's fiction; Aaron Poppleton's presentation on the role that the book as a physical object plays in literature, using Seasame Street's There's a Monster at the End of this Book and Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions; and Ikhlas Hadi's presentation on romanticized necrophilia in versions of Snow White. My presentation on the role space plays in comic narratives made strange bed fellows with these presentations, but there was a thin red string of multimodality that ran through the entire presentation.

The keynote speaker for day one was Dr. Matthew Francis from Aberystwyth who spoke on Arise Evans and his role as an unreliable narrator. Dr. Francis is writing a new novel through Evan's eyes, using his semiprophetic texts and his strange life as the backdrop.

Between sessions, a group of us wandered around the grounds. We attempted to find what was labeled as a lily pond on our map. On our way, there was a gate that lead into a sheep field, and Ikhlas just had to pet one of the sheep standing nearby. She made her way into the field, and the two lambs watched were with suspicion, baa-ing concernedly and chewing the low scrub grass more slowly. If she moved too quickly, the two would flinch and make to take off. She got pretty close to the typically skittish animals before a low gutteral baa-ing was heard to our left. From no where came charging, literally charging, a white sheep with revenge in its eyes. The two lambs made a wide arch around Ikhlas, who wisely decided to run from the field, and huddled behind the huge mother sheep. With that excitement behind us, we continued down the path towards the lily pond.

Which was not much of a lily pond, and more of a swamp. It's a little early in the spring yet for the lilies to be in full bloom or for the wildlife to eat the delicious green algae that covered the majority of the shallow pond. What we found, then, was an algae filled puddle filled with dead reeds. With a disappointed sigh, we made our way back.

The house staff provided us with three meals: dinner the day we arrived, and breakfast and lunch the day we left. Dinner was pretty good: beef wellington served with rice and a roasted root and pepper vegetable mixture. The portion size was typically British, and a little smaller than I would have liked, especially as far as the beef was concerned. The breakfast the next morning was a traditional English big breakfast: bacon, sausage, hash browns, beans (which I opted out of), and fried eggs. There was toast, cereal and fresh fruit. Lunch was a spicy chicken wrap and salad, which was surprisingly delicious. I had never been a huge fan of wraps, but these were really tasty. And of course, tea. There were two tea services that came complete with cakes and biscuits. I have decided that I love this tradition, and need to figure out how to install that experience in my home life. It will require ready access to scones.

I was sad to leave the house after my short trip out there. On the bus ride home through the mountainous countryside, the other presenters and I talked about living out in such a place. I could see myself living in the middle of nowhere, miles from civilization, taking my dog out for a walk in the south east fields in the morning to watch the sun rise over the mountains, and then again in the west fields to watch the sun set. I wonder what I could that didn't involve to much manual labor and would allow me to live in such a place...