The student ID photo! Mine is long gone, but I expect I looked about 12 and rather prim. Loved this installment. I have similar feelings about my Uni years. I don't regret them in some ways (what's the point, it all brought me here), but I was a fish out of water. I had all my liberatory fun as a sixth-former with my nose in Beckett and Eliot and Heaney and Bob Marley and Talking Heads on the common room turntable. By comparison, Uni always felt very constraining. I think it often doesn't live up to expectations, and what comes before/after is a lot more interesting. Look forward to the next chapter.
Glad you so loved this one Heather. I’m well into the writing now, and loved Jeanette Winterson’s permission to re-create my own memories. A much more appealing prospect, I thought, than Foucault’s similar sounding but why would I “repurposing.” I do still admire people who can cope with and make sense of the university thing though. Like my friend Abi whose almost completed PhD is an astonishingly brilliant work. The reading of which only added to my now certain knowledge that my attention span could never have done anything like it. In a million years, never mind four or five.
So pleased Abi completed - I'm still fascinated by anything to do with place, belonging, recovery, reinvention, reconnection, so it's great that she's doing good work in that area.
The student ID photo! Mine is long gone, but I expect I looked about 12 and rather prim. Loved this installment. I have similar feelings about my Uni years. I don't regret them in some ways (what's the point, it all brought me here), but I was a fish out of water. I had all my liberatory fun as a sixth-former with my nose in Beckett and Eliot and Heaney and Bob Marley and Talking Heads on the common room turntable. By comparison, Uni always felt very constraining. I think it often doesn't live up to expectations, and what comes before/after is a lot more interesting. Look forward to the next chapter.
Glad you so loved this one Heather. I’m well into the writing now, and loved Jeanette Winterson’s permission to re-create my own memories. A much more appealing prospect, I thought, than Foucault’s similar sounding but why would I “repurposing.” I do still admire people who can cope with and make sense of the university thing though. Like my friend Abi whose almost completed PhD is an astonishingly brilliant work. The reading of which only added to my now certain knowledge that my attention span could never have done anything like it. In a million years, never mind four or five.
So pleased Abi completed - I'm still fascinated by anything to do with place, belonging, recovery, reinvention, reconnection, so it's great that she's doing good work in that area.