Asking for Directions

An hour later and I’ve stopped at a garage to call again. A voicemail, I’m away from my desk… again. The ordinary streets appear technicolour from the moment I realise I have five minutes left. The simple, well-kept houses, low-level offices and small newsagents rise in strange relief from a background of summer oak and rose-hip. The one-way system: Escher’s late masterpiece. A red-bricked tower like a carved toy, hands slipping like watered ink along the clock-face. I’ll never find it in time. I’ll never find it. The crumpled map they sent me, spread across the steering wheel, looks neutral, helpful even.

I find it, walking distance from where I have been circling for two hours. Two hours is very late. I wonder if they’ll forgive me. I feel as if I’m floating. The offices are smart. There are staff returning from a tennis match. They look happy. The receptionist is kind; I must look vaguely haunted, unhinged, even. They are sorry, but they cannot interview me now. Of course, the response has been ‘overwhelming’, I quote to myself.

I sob all the way home, getting caught up in Reading’s one-way system as unconscious self-punishment. This interview was for the first job I had wanted in the two years since graduating. I ended up with a job at the local council, squelching through allotment-inspections and taking notes at planning committees. I taught English in Madrid, visiting the incredible art at the Prado every weekend. I spent a long time in front of a Goya depicting a magic carpet. I came home to answer the telephones for a computer games studio. (It confirmed what I had always suspected – that nerds are rather cool and very clever, and even make martial arts spoof movies at the weekends...)

But, I had that most modern of western maladies: I was unfulfilled. I once heard it said that we know what we really want when we’re ten years old; when the patterns of perception have cohered, we are able to communicate, but puberty has yet to make us see ourselves through the judging eyes of others. So I thought about it. Back then, I had loved to write. As soon as I had learnt how to, as soon as the awkward loops and angles of the letters had disappeared I realised I could make a world on paper, one where I could write myself into and out of every corner. And I still did, but rarely. Paper now meant invoices, photocopying, money; words meant time-sheets, correcting letters, stationary orders. But what if I took just one year and made it mine?

I walked into my first poetry class on a Master’s degree at Exeter terrified, having used all the poems I’d ever written to get into the course. By the end of the year I’d gained my first publication in an anthology – a sonnet sequence so long I thought no-one would read it let alone print it. I remember receiving the letter and reading the unfamiliar ‘And we are delighted…’ over and over again. I took to entering small poetry competitions regularly, but with no success. I spent about thirty pounds on them every summer at anything from three to seven pounds a go. I heard about the Eric Gregory at around the time I was running out of poetry pocket-money: an award for aspiring young poets. I could send a mini-collection and there was no entry fee. I chose my favourites and sent them away, astounded to learn a few months later that I’d made the long-list. Content with that, I swore my parents to secrecy: I’d try again next year as I was sure I wouldn’t be selected this time. But I was, along with four others. It gave me an incredible boost and allowed me to believe I could write.

I’m now in my third year of a PhD at Sussex University, which is where my academic career began. They run an unusual degree combining creative writing with critical theory. It’s a common view that no-one can teach you to write and I think that’s true to an extent, but all abilities need focus and the necessary tools to flourish, and writing’s no exception. Andy Brown, an accomplished and sensitive writer himself, taught me the foundations of the craft of writing and transformed my practice, giving me the confidence to find a square hole for my square peg. Now, I write fiction and poetry, teach at my university and help run a writer’s group. Now, when I’m struck by the weird inner-life of an object, or the fine line between myself and the world, I know what to do.

Before I go, I’d like to thank the wonky logic of the universe for a few things. This is my personal list of essentials:

- 1 bad map
- The Oxford one-way system
- The very secluded offices of a publishing company
- Myself aged ten.