Last month our department held its annual conference, this year title ‘Statistics in the Age of AI’. The conference is held in the memory of Peter Hall, one of the great professors of Statistics who passed away almost nine years ago now. This year we had many interesting speakers from around the country, plus several of our alumni came back to talk about the topic and about their own experiences working in Stats/Data Science in modern industry. We are of course in the Age of AI, and a lot of what was presented went way over my head. Despite all the years of being exposed to top-level statisticians, none of it has rubbed off on me, I’m none the wiser about any of it. I stopped learning maths at school at the age of 16, when I worked hard to get a ‘C’ at GCSE, which was the top grade available to those in my level two class. Yes it was  a bit strange thinking back that a C was the highest grade available to me but I made my choice. I was in the top class for maths, but I was not very strong at it, I found the work confusing and frankly pointless, and I really didn’t like my teacher who scared me witless. So rather than go into my GCSE years struggling in the top set with the risk of being moved down, I requested to be moved into the second set, which would not only be a lot more manageable in terms of workload but the teacher was so much nicer, and I really learned a lot. The tradeoff was that I would not be able to get an A or B in the final grade. Since I was worried I’d get a D anyway, this didn’t bother me. I was usually top or among the top in that class (I was a bit like Burnley or Southampton or Sheffield United when they are in the Championship) and still remember working really hard at it, going to Edgware Library to study after school. When I got my C, which was a pass, I was well pleased and I put my calculator down and said, this is good enough. We don’t have to study maths beyond that age in England if we don’t want to, so I never did, let alone statistics. None of this really has anything to do with this conference other than I didn’t understand much of what was being said, but my job was to make sure the whole thing ran smoothly, so I was there all day from open to very late close, often by myself but I relied very much on the hard work of other staff too, lots of great teamwork, and keeping busy kept my mind off the world. I even got to present my poster of the faculty family tree I put together in the summer. It was nice to meet and greet people and make sure they were well fed. I wasn’t going to sketch as well but in those quieter moments I can’t help myself. So here are a few sketches of people enjoying what turned out to be a really nice event.