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A ‘symposium’, of course, is a party – ‘a convivial meeting for drinking, conversation, and intellectual entertainment’, as the OED puts it. And geographers, it seems, aren’t good at parties. Peter Gould (1985: 4) opened his The Geographer at Work with a description of a cocktail party where he was asked the dreaded question ‘And what do you do?’ – dreaded because it elicits ‘[t]hat awful feeling of desperate foolishness when you, a professional geographer, find yourself incapable of explaining simply and shortly to others what you really do’. What’s worse, arguably, is that if we struggle to articulate what geography is all about, then our fellow partygoers are only too happy to help us out. Trevor Barnes (2002: 9) remembers being at a party, ‘…sitting on the floor with other guests in a…