I come to you today from a train taking me away from Preston, back to London Euston. We've been given a free upgrade to First Class and I have Internet access - what more could a girl ask for?
I've spent the weekend in Lancaster with two old friends as we revisited haunts from our university days. Many pubs have been involved, one campus, a seaside town, curry houses, buses, and a lovely hotel with magnificent food. I haven't done any writing, haven't thought about writing, barely talked about the publishing world that takes up so many of my waking and sleeping hours - it's been just the break I needed.
Memory lanes are funny old things though, aren't they? For me, university was a challenging combination of fun and misery, great friendships, awful fallings out. My final year was bleak and I still shudder to recall the aching loneliness of what it is to be young and unhappy. Revisiting the house we lived in for a year at Morecambe made me breathless with excitement, but the years hadn't been kind to it. Rotten window panes, moss-covered steps, fading paint, a sagging roof... Why hadn't anyone looked after the shell that once housed some of the most significant moments in a 20-year-old's young life? Standing in the back alley amongst the puddles, I gazed up at my old bedroom window and was glad not to have even a glimmer of the misery I'd once felt, walking home down that alley one morning 19 years ago.The past is another country - I did things differently there.
I also visited the campus library and picked out a bound copy of my old exam papers, spotting the question on King Lear that I'd answered. The student newspaper is still going strong and I flicked through that, remembering my own attempts to help on the paper. (Too shy to actually write, I acted as their proofreader for a few weeks.) There was the bookshop where I'd bought a copy of every Margaret Atwood novel I could get my hands on, each 'series branded' with matching cover designs. All the pieces of the jigsaw were falling slowly into place. The final piece came when I attended a lecture from industry professionals on publishing as a career. Their opening statement was stark: if you want to earn your fortune, don't come and work in publishing. I remember walking back to halls, trying to decide if their warnings were enough to put me off. By the time I pushed open the bedroom door, I knew my fate was sealed. I was going to go and work in publishing. 400 application letters and a postgraduate diploma later, I found myself in the arse end of Caledonian Road working for a book packager, living in Hackney. My career in publishing had begun. I was already a long way away from that little house in Morecambe. But it was lovely to see it again this weekend. It's still part of who I am. I fell in love there - not just with a silly boy, but with a life that led me here today.
Leave a comment