133 A head appeared above the blank, burgundy desk divider, smiling broadly with his trademark charismatic sense of mirth. It was Brian, returned from his taste of cheroot. He apologised, but a brainstorming session I had been invited to, planned for this morning, had been shifted to later. A plane had been delayed for a couple of hours at Heathrow, reminding me that the effect of that airport was inescapable, air-travel fumes always filled the studio, were suffocating; flows from the opening of another vein for corporate traffic in employee bodies. I thanked him for not writing off my invitation, despite the increased intensity and sensitivity that this delay would have on the discussion.
I was enormously grateful to Brian (and many others at Blue), for always finding the time to talk to me, to invite me in to meetings, despite considerable pressures: a stream of crises, reorganisations, infeasible deadlines, and so on. Although the design studio leached away my senses, the circulation of people who worked within its walls (never fixed, always an ongoing migration between corporate locations) had developed thicker skin; their bodies remained solid, buoyant, resisting. It was a practice of resistance I needed to understand.
And then it was time to meet her, the Future Archaeologist. We had decided to visit one another at our respective fieldsites, to understand and compare our practices of interference and the reconstructions we each wove.
I returned to the stairs, and headed downwards. In the expanse of the four storey atrium, filled with odd murmurs of quiet conversation, the Future Archaeologist waited for me, as we had agreed. For this, of course, was not some true ethnographic account, but a collage of moments and experiences from my ethnography, juxtaposed to create a fieldsite. I was walking through those moments, folding time and space into a narrative, which I could empirically account for in fragments (for how is any accounting done except by tracing fragments). As my footsteps traced my path through the atrium, as they had done so many times in my research, I was also presencing multiple paths, multiple times and multiple memories. This story of Blue was a poetic evocation of a design studio in the mobile telecoms