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I completed a degree in classics at Cambridge and entered the British Civil Service. After a moderately successful, if unremarkable career, I took an early retirement and now live in London, spending my now free time at the opera and the theatre …. No, that's not right. Start again. Having decided to become a social anthropologist, I had my first experience of fieldwork on the island of Crete. I went on to specialise in the anthropology of modern Greece, and also wrote several popular books about people and places in Greece. I now live in one of the picturesque hill-towns of the Peloponnese …. No, not that either. Try once more. My father, who was a gifted amateur photographer, gave me a classic Rolleiflex camera for my 21st birthday, and I became a professional photographer, specialising in documentary photographic essays on social conditions in rural Europe. No, not that either …. I combined my first degree in social anthropology with a postgraduate training in linguistics. I went on to research and publish on discourse and social interaction, bringing together interactionist sociology, anthropology and semiotics. Well, not quite …. As you will see, all of these – and other – lives might have been mine. The actual life seems no more coherent than those shreds of unrealised possibilities.