Lanyard

My flatmate had a spare ticket because her company had a stand and someone had dropped out, and she said, "there's a free lunch and the coffee's decent," and I was between contracts and it was raining, so. I want to say up front that I don't own any of it. I'm a translator. I know what a blockchain is the way I know what a carburettor is, which is to say I could describe one to a child and would fall apart under questioning. The venue was a converted warehouse by the river with the sort of lighting that makes everyone look like they're about to be interviewed. There were three thousand people and four hundred of them were wearing the same black hoodie, which I found out later was from a company that had gone under two months previously, so the hoodie was a kind of mourning. I got my lanyard. It said ATTENDEE, in a font that was trying too hard. The first talk I wandered into was about "the future of decentralised identity" and I understood about one sentence in five, but the man giving it was so completely certain, so unshadowed by doubt, that I found it weirdly relaxing, like listening to a weather forecast for a country you'll never visit. Lunch was, in fairness, excellent. Then there was the man with the hat. He was maybe seventy, a proper straw hat, linen jacket, standing at the back of a panel on "real-world assets" with his arms folded. He looked like he'd wandered in from a different conference, possibly a different century. I ended up next to him at the coffee. "You're not one of them," he said. Not a question. "Translator. Free lunch." "Ah." He nodded like this was the most sensible thing anyone had said all day. "I'm a bond trader. Was. Retired. I come every year." "Why?" He thought about it. "In 1987 I sat in a room like this. Different technology, same faces. Half of them were right and half of them were crooks and the trouble was they wore the same hoodie." He sipped his coffee. "I like to see if I can still tell."

"Can you?" "About sixty percent. The crooks have got better at the hoodie." I spent the rest of the afternoon with him, more or less. He'd stand at the back of things and every so often lean over and say "that one's real" or "that one's a slide deck", and I have no way of checking, but he said it with such calm that I've been thinking about it since. There was a young woman talking about payments in countries where the banks don't work, and he said "real", and there was a very loud man with a token whose name was a pun, and he said "slide deck", and there was a panel about art that he watched all the way through and then said, "Don't know. Nobody does. That's the honest one." At six the free drinks started and the hoodies got louder and he put his hat on properly and said, "This is where I leave. It's the same every year. Something about the second drink and they all start telling you the price." "Will you come back next year?" "If there is one." I stayed for the second drink. He was right. Someone told me the price within four minutes. I still don't own any. But I've thought about the sixty percent a lot, and the honest panel, and the four hundred people wearing a dead company on their chests. I'd go again. Not for the lunch.