Once upon a time, when I was very young, I travelled to a faraway island with an antenna in my bag that I had put together myself. Everything I knew about antennas I had learned in a single evening from an elderly retired naval engineer, a no nonsense expert in his field, shaped by lifetime in the military, we sat in his den - a clean office with medals and oil paintings of grey steel warships hung square and level. His serious visage beamed with love and delight when his partner - whose projected persona was the polar opposite of his own reserve - a flamboyantly camp man in trailing colorful silks who brought us cups of tea and exquisite little cakes, and would look at the the notes I was taking an theatrically shudder, swooning with the the back of hand to his forehead that ‘he never would never understand all that stuff’

I wasn’t entirely sure I did either - the retired engineer was able to explain things in the lingo of his trade, but couldnt confirm my attempts to connect the terms he was using to my first year university physics concepts.

But a month later I was sending an email from the jungle via length of unspooled cable