Graham Potter is in his office, zig-zagging through memories from Hull to Ghana to Leeds to Sweden to Swansea. It's the travel-log of a marvelously unconventional career and also the reason why he offers a delightful perspective on the subject of managerial problem-solving.
In time he will come to the issues of his modern world, where he has somehow kept the Swans going in league and cup despite what might be termed as a royal plucking from those in charge.
Before any of that, he rewinds nine years to his final game as a player, aged 34, and one of his early assignments as a manager at Leeds Metropolitan University.
Graham Potter is preparing his Swansea side for their FA Cup clash with Manchester City
Potter spoke to Sportsmail about his time as manager at Leeds Metropolitan University
'Those were interesting days,' he tells Sportsmail. 'I remember we used to have our sessions on a Monday and a Thursday but Wednesday was the main athletic union night out, so you would get a few of the lads turning up worse for wear. Suddenly you are adjusting training plans to deal with hangovers. That was one issue.
'Then you have to factor in term times, because the football season continues even when the students aren't there and you are begging people to play on a Saturday. That's actually how my last game as a player came about. I had to register myself once against Tadcaster Albion to be on the bench.
'I got on the pitch and I realised very quickly I was old. The adrenaline is there but the body just can't do what the brain believes it should be able to do. So that was me done, but those were the kind of situations you had to deal with, getting players to fill a team.'
It's a charming aspect of Potter's trip on a road less traveled that he has acquired stories less often heard. Take another one from Ostersunds, where he rocked up for his first proper gig in 2010 before leaving for Swansea last year after three promotions and amid tales of squad productions of Swan Lake in the name of community integration.
The challenge there, aside from landing at a foreign club with barely 500 match-going supporters, was the weather. It would regularly drop to -25 degrees.
Potter told Sportsmail about the freezing conditions he had to cope with at Ostersunds
'In January you would have to train indoors but even in February, when we went outdoors, it would be -20 sometimes,' he says. 'We would just about set a limit on -18 as the cut off as anything more is dangerous. One of the things with that is that the balls freeze.
'We had this session at -18 and every 20 minutes we literally had to change the balls because they were becoming like cannon balls. I'll never forget - the boys were sweating and it was freezing on their faces and they had icicles forming on their eyebrows and coming down.
'They were snapping eyelashes off. You had this session plan and suddenly you are like, "I can't leave them standing around". You adapt to your surroundings and challenges in management.'
And that, really, is the point. Surroundings. Challenges. Adaptation. If the surroundings change, the rules of the other two still stand. Which brings us back to Swansea and what has
