When it was best, it was group work – this is how I could roughly describe how my academic life has gone on. On the one hand, I am of the kind that enjoys solitude, but on the other, work still goes more smoothly together with another person or more. My actions have been guided, if I dare say so, not so much by ambition as curiosity. I have been curious and restless rather than profound and thorough. But I reckon we need people like me as well; after all, the subject of research is the academic community, not the individual, a fact that Ilkka Niiniluoto emphasised a long time ago.

When I finally started working at the University of Helsinki, after a series of setbacks and mishaps, it was all very happy at first, though I never found acceptance, not to mention affection, among the old gentlemen of academia. However, I had the liberty of teaching things that had never before been taught in the department but which I found important – new theories of syntax, text analysis, pragmatics and the history of our subject, the Finnish language.

Quite soon I got funding from the Academy of Finland for a research project, in which I asked a group of my students to join. Over time this project was to ‘produce’ not only five doctoral dissertations but eleven children, but above all it was about absorbing a new field of research together with the students.

I have stopped counting all the dissertations of conversation analysis – some might say there are too many. In any case, I have made myself dispensable, for which I am grateful.