And today we come to the bit I’ve been very vague about since September. I am at a conference for people who do travel-related things. The people I’ve met today and the people who’ve been on the trips and tours all week are travel writers, photographers, film-makers, bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, TikTokers and any other platform you can think to put something travel-related. All the tours have been included in the price of the conference ticket – that’s the trip out to the Chronicles on Tuesday, the Old Town tour, wine-tasting and lunch and the viewpoint tour on Wednesday, the enamel workshop, visit to the IDP village and lunch on Thursday and the cave town tour yesterday, plus all the drinks and meals I’ve skipped, plus two days of conference plus lunch and snacks and drinks over the weekend. A surprisingly affordable way to see a lot of Georgia! And what with writing it up here every day, I’m pretty confident I’m the first blogger to be producing blog content!

Today there were four sets of four sessions. I opted for the travel writing one in the morning, the Power of Narrative, constantly interrupted by an older gentleman who shares his name with a big fluffy naughty cat who seems to be a newspaper journalist, who kept pointing out far too loudly “We’re not fiction writers! We don’t know about things like the three act structure!”. A) Speak for yourself. I’m terrible at writing fiction but I’ve had a go and I know plenty of the mechanics and plenty of the theory B) can you really not see that/how narrative structure works in non-fiction? C) Will you listen to Alex and stop assuming you know better?

Before lunch and after lunch were two sessions on editing travel videos. I’ve been filming snippets of my trips since about 2013 but filming enough to put together and actually putting them together are two things I haven’t really mastered. Lunch was in either the upstairs restaurant or the downstairs one and took the form of a Georgian buffet – less pressure to eat all the things but also no cheese-stuffed khachapuri today! I had plain bread but I decided to be a grown-up and ask for butter and some was produced! So it was bread and water but at least it was bread and butter.

The last session of the day wasn’t a particularly good choice for my particular interests and the one I ended up going along to was “being a presenter”. If I’m going to stitch together my snippets, I may as well get some tips on how to explain to the camera what it’s seeing. I’ve never been a big fan of talking to machines, not since Alain Kamber typed, letter by letter “il faut un accent” during a language lab session back in 2005.

And that was it for the day. Actually, it wasn’t. At lunchtime, two of the staff came rushing over in great excitement because the finished enamel had been delivered and they wanted to see everyone’s reaction to opening the little bags and seeing our finished work. There were only ten of us but I was slightly amazed that armed with a name tag and an enamel pendant, they seemed to go to the right people without having to ask what our names were. That’s been a theme of the week. We’ve seen the same faces over and over again but no one can keep track of the corresponding names. Anyway, since I last saw this pendant, it’s been baked a few times, a few more layers of colour put in and it’s been polished and you just wouldn’t know that a couple of days ago, we were painting fine glass powder into raised outlines because they’re absolutely smooth and slightly domed and very beautiful. “Look what we made!” we all exclaimed but we have to admit, Ikorta did far more work on them than we did.

The big party is tonight but it’s been an intense week with lots of early mornings and long days and lots of food and wine and I’m staying in tonight. Straight home at 5.30 (well, got on the metro in the wrong direction because I wasn’t paying attention), got some more juice and I’m not even going for a sulphur bath tonight. Conference day 2 tomorrow, then the long ride home on Monday.