GLFN Episode 1: Methodology
Right.
So.
I should say upfront that I had a plan. I want that on the record. There was a plan, it was sensible, and it did not involve any of this.
The plan was: two episodes. Notes. Bed by ten. I'd told myself this at quarter past nine with the conviction of a woman who has never once been in bed by ten in her adult life but has retained, against all evidence, the optimism to keep trying. The self nodded along. We were in agreement. It was going to be fine.
That was before Arlong Park.
I'm not going to talk about Arlong Park. The point is that by half eleven I was still on the sofa, still in the duvet that hadn't been washed since the last time I had feelings about my supervision timetable, and I was taking notes with the focused energy of someone who has decided, on insufficient evidence, that this counts as working.
*Comedic vocalisation in serialised narrative fiction.* That's the thesis. Six months to write that sentence. My mother still thinks I watch cartoons for a living, which is almost true and also completely wrong, and I've stopped trying to explain the difference because the potatoes always get passed in that particular way that means the subject is closed.
The point — and there is a point, this is a thesis, there are always points — is that I needed primary sources. You can't study a laugh from a transcript. You can't study it from a waveform analysis or a secondary critical text or a very long footnote, and believe me, I have tried all of those things, and my supervisor's note on page sixty-two was "spirited," which is academic for *what on earth is this.*
I needed to hear them. In context. *In situ.* That was the methodological problem I'd been failing to solve for four months.
And then Luffy did the thing with his arms, and in the background, barely audible, someone went *shishishi* with the absolute ease of a man who has looked at the world and found it, on balance, rather amusing —
And I thought: *I could just go.*
I want to be clear that I did not think this was going to work. I picked up the remote — not to pause it, just to have something to hold — and I walked toward the screen the way you walk toward something when you've had a thought you recognise as either very good or very stupid and haven't worked out which yet.
I'd like to tell you there was a flash of light. A sound. Something that would hold up in a written account.
There was not. One moment I was standing in my sitting room in Hackney and the next I was standing on a dock somewhere that smelled aggressively of salt and fish and something I can only describe as *consequence,* and behind me there was nothing, just open air, and ahead of me there was a port town that was not London in any sense I could identify.
I stood very still.
A seagull landed on a post about two feet away and looked at me.
I looked at it.
"Yes, alright," I said.
I opened to a fresh page.
*Field entry,* I wrote. *Location: Grand Line, unspecified. Time: unclear. Trousers: confirmed. Begin.*
-0-
The first thing I did was attempt to act normal, which is easier when you have a notepad because a notepad communicates purpose. People with notepads are going somewhere or documenting something, and either way they're not your problem. I have survived four years of academic conferences on this principle alone.
The dock was busy in the way of a place that is always busy — not frantic, just continuous, the kind of movement that's been happening long enough to have a rhythm. Crates. Ropes. Boats I didn't have the vocabulary to name. People who looked like they had somewhere to be and the upper body strength to get there.
Nobody looked at me twice. I chose to take this as a good sign rather than examine it.
I walked. I kept the notepad visible and my pace deliberate, which is conference walk, which works everywhere, and I moved through the port toward what looked like a market and tried to take stock of the situation with the composure of someone who has not just walked through their television.
The composure held for approximately four minutes.
Then I stopped at a fruit stall.
The fruit was wrong. Not rotten — just wrong. Colours that fruit shouldn't be. Shapes that fruit had no business having. One of them appeared to be partially translucent. I looked at it for a moment.
"Interesting," I said, which is what I say when things are alarming and I've decided not to be alarmed yet.
The man behind the stall had the build of someone who has resolved a significant number of disagreements physically and retains no particular regret about any of them. He was watching me the way cats watch things — not hostile, just measuring.
I opened the notepad.
"Excuse me," I said, in the voice I use for conference panels, which I have developed into something approaching a force field. "I'm conducting academic research into patterns of comedic vocalisation. Would you be willing to —"
*Hehehe.*
Low. Unhurried. From the side of the mouth rather than the front, like he was sharing a joke with himself that the rest of the world was welcome to overhear if it could keep up.
I wrote it down before he'd fully finished.
*Hehehe — low register, side-of-mouth delivery. The laugh of a man who finds things amusing the way a cat finds a trapped mouse amusing. Not joy exactly. Professional appreciation.*
"What are you writing," he said.
"Notes."
"About my laugh."
"About your laugh."
He looked at me for a long moment. The weighing-up look. I held his gaze with the specific blankness of a person who has learned that silence is only uncomfortable if you let it be, and I waited.
"You're a strange woman," he said.
"My supervisor says the same thing. He means it as a criticism." I clicked the pen. "I've chosen to receive it otherwise."
*Hehehe.*
I wrote: *Laugh recurs at regular intervals regardless of whether stimulus is present. Possibly habitual. Do not write "possibly a condition" in the final thesis.*
-0-
I spent six hours in that port.
I interviewed a harbourmaster who wanted to see my papers. I presented my university ID card. He looked at it for a long time — both sides — handed it back, and let me through, which I think says something interesting about the universal authority of laminated documents.
I interviewed a woman selling something that turned out to be rope, not food, which was a misunderstanding I blame entirely on the signage. Her laugh — *fufufu,* delicate, deliberate, the laugh of someone who knows exactly what's funny and has decided you can work it out yourself — got four lines of notes and a star, which is my system for *return to this.*
I interviewed three men who were having a disagreement and waited it out on a nearby crate until they were done, at which point I asked all three of them about their laughs and they were too knackered to refuse. Good data, all of it.
By the time the light started going amber I had eleven entries and a functional map of the port drawn on the inside back cover, and I was eating something from a stall that I hadn't been able to identify but had bought anyway on the basis that I was hungry and it smelled alright.
It tasted alright. I decided this was sufficient.
I found a wall to sit against that was out of the main foot traffic and opened to a fresh page and started writing up the day's notes in full, cross-referencing, adding observations I hadn't had time to complete in the moment. This is fieldwork. This is what fieldwork looks like. I am doing fieldwork. Technically.
I did not think about home.
I thought about it a little.
I put it in a section at the back of the notepad labelled *PENDING* and kept writing.
-0-
At some point I looked up and it was dark.
This happens when you're writing. Time is not a factor you're tracking, and then suddenly it is, and you've lost several hours and gained, if you're lucky, something worth having lost them for.
I had twelve entries. I had the bones of a revised methodology. I had, taped to the back cover with a strip from the margin of a page I'd torn out, a small hand-drawn chart that was already more interesting than anything I'd produced in the last three weeks in Hackney.
I also had no accommodation, no local currency, no clear sense of the social infrastructure, and no way home.
That last one I had been not-thinking-about for six hours with some success. I decided, since it was now dark and the port was quieter and I had no further excuse, to think about it.
I went back to where I'd arrived. The end of the dock. I stood exactly where I'd been standing.
Nothing happened.
I stood there for four minutes, very precisely, checking the clock on my phone which still had no signal but still told the time, which felt like the universe offering the smallest possible consolation.
Nothing continued to happen.
I moved slightly to the left in case position was a factor.
Nothing.
I moved back.
A cat appeared from somewhere and sat on the dock nearby and watched me with the expression of an animal that has seen stranger things than this and found them equally pointless.
"I'm aware," I said.
The cat said nothing, which was appropriate.
I stood there for another four minutes. Eleven minutes total. Then I picked up my notepad and walked back toward the port.
*The methodology,* I wrote, as I walked, *has encountered an unforeseen variable. Specifically: there is no exit. The route of entry does not appear to function as a route of return. Further research required.*
I found a bench near the harbour wall and sat on it.
The sea was very dark and very large and entirely indifferent to my situation, which I found, somehow, almost restful. There is something to be said for a thing that large not caring about your problems. It puts the problems in a kind of perspective. Not a useful perspective. Just a perspective.
I opened to the *PENDING* section. I looked at it.
Then I opened to a fresh page, near the back, and wrote at the top: *THE QUESTION OF GOING HOME.*
Underneath it: *Pending.*
I closed the notepad.
I looked at the sea for a while.
Somewhere in the port, someone laughed — *wahaha,* sudden and total, arriving like weather — and it went out across the water and the water didn't mind it, just kept going, same as before.
I took the notepad back out. I wrote it down.
*Can't waste data,* I thought.
*Right,* I thought. *Right.*
-0+
*She slept on the bench. She would like it noted that she has slept in worse places, specifically the postgraduate common room in 2021 during the marking period, and that the bench was structurally adequate. In the morning she would find lodgings, establish a working budget, and develop a revised research plan.*
*She did not think about Denise, who would assume she'd gone to a conference.*
*She thought about Denise a little.*
*The seagull was still there in the morning. She chose not to interpret this as a sign of anything.*