A Great Taste in Lipstick and a 1st Class Degree

Once, I was discussing my intention to become a university lecturer with a colleague at an office job. She was telling me how her daughter had gone in to accounting, and that ‘she used to have blonde hair, but she started dying it dark because you can’t be taken seriously in business with blonde hair’. I was gobsmacked, not only because I was surprised by the sheer stupidity of what she’d said but also because my hair was down to my hips and shiny, beachy blonde... The fucking CHEEK.

As a heteronormative white female, I can only speculate that the everyday interactions people of colour and/or none-cis individuals are underpinned by their identities as black, gay, trans etc. I hypothesise that this is the case based upon the fact that I experience something similar as a result of my gender. Specifically, in the context of academia.

Heads up – this is an account based solely on my personal experiences over the past 4 years; I’m not laying claim to some sort of objective truth here.

As you may well know from previous posts, I am an MA English student at the University of Nottingham. During my time in higher education, I have received some very sociologically interesting feedback.

Just as my old office job colleague demonstrated, many people in the context of university and beyond have blatantly taken one look at me (I’m tall, slim, wear make-up and have long blonde hair) and decided that I ‘don’t look clever’. Of course, nobody has ever SAID that to me. Rather, they start meticulously explaining things I learned at A Level even though I’m now a master’s student, or make ‘dumb blonde’ jokes, or suggest I look at the ‘more straightforward’ essay questions.

I actually don’t mind this. It makes their thinly-veiled surprise when they read my transcript or speak to me for a few shifts much funnier. Guess what? People don’t have to be just one kind of person. We aren’t stereotypes. We’re 3 dimensional. So what if I’m a clumsy slut-dropper with great taste in lipstick and a 1^st class degree?

Most poignantly, however, is the response I’ve gotten from female lecturers compared with males. On numerous occasions, female lecturers have been curt with me, taken a general disliking to me or been actively unhelpful.

Bear with me; I know this is a controversial statement, so I’ll back it up. One gave me 69 in an essay (one mark below a 1^st) and when I asked her why I didn’t get 70, she said ‘because I didn’t get a first when I was in second year’. Logic.

Another wrote me a bad reference because I forgot to ask permission to include her as a referee. Despite the fact that it was essentially my mistake, I think it was uncalled for and unprofessional. I was a 19-year-old undergrad, for god’s sake.

I have to be especially vague about this last one because it happened very recently. I sent the same email to two lecturers from the same module, one male and one female, and the female replied succinctly (almost robotically), while the male teacher engaged with my comments and proceeded to offer further advice and support. Weird.

So here’s what I’ve surmised. This pattern is less to do with MY social position as a woman and more to do with THEIRS. Based upon my own experiences, I think in the context of academia, women feel like they are on a back foot. It seems that especially high intelligence is not indexical of femininity. Therefore, there is some tension between their identity as a woman and their identity as an academic.

Perhaps female academics feel the need to be assertive because they had to work far harder to achieve the same positions as their male counterparts. I don’t know, but what I do know is that my role as a woman seems to become more and more relevant as I move through the education system.

Fragments

As many of you will know, on Friday morning our weekday normality was shattered by a chunk of roof tile.

We were running late, as usual (I am one of those people who is perpetually late). My car is an absolute state at the best of times, so for a split second I thought the tile was just another piece of shit I’d gathered on my travels that’d ended up on the passenger side floor. At the same time that I spotted the tile, I registered that it was chucking it down, so I flicked the wipers on. What was left of the back window rained in to the boot. My heart lurched to the tinkling tune of breaking glass.

“What the fuck…”. It was Joel’s voice. I glanced from the gaping hole in my car to the piece of tile on the floor and his eyes followed. “What the FUCK,” he repeated, lurching out of the car to open what was left of the boot.

It was becoming increasingly clear with each passing second that I was about to lose my shit. I don’t know why I said “what was in the boot” at this point, my voice shrill and melting in to a sob by the fourth syllable. I knew what had been in the boot.

.........

I don’t carry a handbag, I carry a backpack. It’s a habit that’s left over from my football-playing, boy-fighting childhood. I’d carried that burgundy Jack Wills one around the world, from Australia to Europe to Iceland to America to the Maldives to Southeast Asia…

At the bottom of the bag were the tokens of my journeys. Tickets, keyrings, Disney badges, GoPro accessories, an underwater case for my phone, all manner of currency. Gifts that Joel had gotten me for our very first anniversary.

In addition to all of that, there was a lot of shit (e.g. a 5 year old pack of Microgynon – remember that girls – and random bits of A Level revision). Joel had been on at me to clear that bag out for years. He said the stuff I was hoarding was taking up space that could be used for stuff we actually needed, hahaha.

I’d been to uni on the Thursday evening; I’d needed to renew a couple of books at the library. That bag had carried many many things in its time, and that evening it contained all of my notes, 2 library books and my purse. I should’ve taken it out of the car. Of COURSE I should have. The one night my purse was in my bag and not in the house… But isn’t that always the way it goes?

That night, Joel had football and I had a gin (or 3). I was stressed about money. We did manage to scrape enough together for the rent but I haven’t shopped for everyone for Christmas yet. That makes me miserable because my mother deserves an island for Christmas and all I can afford is a fucking selection box.

I went to bed semi-drunk. I was upset with myself for not getting a job sooner, for not ringing home enough, for not making enough of an effort with friends and more importantly, with Joel. Of course, I dealt with that by shutting off from everyone and not waiting up for Joel. Classic Dover behaviour.

.........

So, you see, when I realised my backpack was gone on Friday morning, I was already on the brink of an absolute meltdown. I think Joel thought I’d actually lost my mind. I was distantly aware of him taking my phone off me as a screamed the fucking house down. “Shhhh Char… Char… Char, I’ll get your mum”.

My mum is my reset button. No matter how much I screw everything up, she evens it out again. I told her this and she said, “Just don’t fucking get arrested there’s nothing I can do about that.” I don’t think she’s giving herself enough credit. Sure enough, everything is OK again thanks to her, gramps and Julian. What a phenomenal set of parents I have.

One thing I do want to comment on as part of this post is the fractured state of our emergency services. Of course, as well as my mum, we phoned the police. A kind officer came around to the house having found some of my stuff. Shame about the torrential rain, though, because not a lot of it was salvageable.

Anyway, she took some details down and I pointed out the CCTV camera on the house opposite ours. The family who live there are really lovely and had helped me cover the broken window with sheets of plastic in the pouring rain (probably because I looked like a blubbering nutcase). She said she would have a look at the footage but if there were no clear faces “it probably wouldn’t make any difference”.

As in, “there’s probably nothing we can do about it”. That message was loud and clear from the police on Friday. My car is a mess of rainwater and glass, my precious things are gone or ruined, I have no money to fix the window… And there’s nothing you can do about it.

That isn’t anyone’s fault individually. Our emergency services are a casualty of the cracking economy. Today, the police are nothing more than an illusion of protection. 3 times in my life I have found myself needing the police, and 3 times in my life a lone officer has given me a crime number and said, “there’s probably nothing we can do about it”. I thank god I haven’t yet needed an ambulance.

I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist (you should hear Joel), but this is not sustainable. There is nothing deterring people from committing crime anymore. Officers patrol alone and cover impossibly large areas. Theft and vandalism are being ignored and, to be honest, it frightens me that one day I might be raped or worse and hear those gutting words, “there’s probably nothing we can do about it.”

The hands of the police are tied. Our great NHS is on its knees. I’m not clever enough to figure out what we’re supposed to do about it, but we must do something. If we don’t, the jagged fragments of our country will cut us open, one by one.

A Job's Worth

Alongside my academic pursuits and in between our ‘world tours’ (as grandad calls them) I’ve had a part time job since I was 16. From the moment I stepped out of Priory for the last time, Trace was on my back to get a job in a shop or a restaurant to make some pennies and learn some life lessons.

Around the same time I started my A Levels, I got offered a job at The Catherine’s Inn where grandad used to take me and Charley Williams every Monday lunchtime in between our college classes. I was thrilled (mostly because it would get mum off my back).

I distinctly remember my first shift, in which one of my now-colleagues slammed a door in my face, I took the wrong thing to the wrong table too many times and my now-manager called the lady on table 1 ‘fat cunt’. I was fresh out of school and way out of my depth…

In time, I grew to love the crazy pub life. I learned how to run with hot plates for 8 hours without a break. I learned to swear like a sailor in the kitchen and smile like an angel out front. I learned that if you’re too slow, you’ll get the shit ripped out of you. Have you ever worked in hospitality? Its NUTS.

I stayed at this job for 2 years, until I met Joel in 2014. Back then, his sister was the manager at The Cellar Wine Bar, and he worked in the kitchen there. As soon as I met the girls and did a shift with them, I knew it was time to leave the Catherine’s. You wouldn’t believe the amount of times I bawled my eyes out at/about that pub, and yet when I handed Justin my notice, it was with a heavy heart. That place grew me up, and I made the most unforgettable friends.

Justin, I appreciate now how nice it was to have you as a manager. I’m back in hospitality now and it’s so weird without you! Hope all is well up there.

Anyway, The Cellar is gorgeous; a quaint, homely wine bar which doubles up as a café during the day. A little (lot) more high-class than the Catherine’s, which was an absolute dream to now 18-year-old me.

I am so pleased to say that I’m still working at The Cellar every other weekend. My very best friends work or have worked here, and The Cellar feels as much like home as anywhere else in the South West.

Recently, we’ve been faced with the realisation that Joel’s full-time job isn’t enough to run a house (and keep a hungry little Tiger). I would’ve liked nothing more than to focus on my MA but there we go – real life is unforgiving. I applied for a load of jobs and, in the end, I heard back from 2. A pub and a beauty counter at Boots.

I went to both interviews and the pub offered me a job on the spot (I’ve been waitressing since I was 16 so I kind of expected to get this one). They even said they were happy for me to go home every other weekend to work at The Cellar and see my family. Nothing from Boots which I was a bit disappointed about because I fancied trying something new. Oh well, I thought, I only need 16 hours. I started working at the pub and everyone seemed really lovely. The job was similar to the Catherine’s (hard work but somewhat fun when you get in to it).

Weeks later, Boots called. They said they’d like to offer me the job. I said “great”, hung the phone up and immediately regretted it… There was no way I’d be able to manage 2 jobs in Nottingham and still be able to visit the family every other weekend.

In the end, my decision was made simple by the Boots rota. They had put me on a short six-week contract (to cover them over Christmas) and wanted me in throughout December with little room for manoeuvre. They had me on 25 hours. Joel’s birthday is in December, The Cellar Christmas party is in December, and Santa comes in December, too, of course. Some things in life aren’t worth compromising. It is a part time job – not a career. I told them I wasn’t prepared to sacrifice important time with my family and friends and left it at that.

I’m loving the pub job to be honest. It gets me out the house, I am making some lovely friends and a little bit of money, too. Most importantly, the managers understand my other commitments, from uni to going home to live my old life every other weekend. I’m way less stressed working for people like that than people who aren’t willing to acknowledge that a) I have a life outside of my part time job and b) my future career (and my heart) is in Language and Literature, not, in fact on their makeup counter...

With regards to the hospitality/retail debate, I think everyone’s different. Joel can’t stand waiting tables but he worked in Tesco for a long time without complaint. I did 2 shifts at Boots and didn’t enjoy the sales-driven atmosphere at all. I’ll take the late nights and the running about any day of the week.

Remember, fundamentally, a part-time job’s worth is money, especially when you’re doing it alongside another job or education, but it can be more than that. An understanding of your needs and your existence as a 3-dimensional human being makes it more than that. Your team make it more than that.

I’ll tell you what my mum said, shall I? Part-time jobs in retail and hospitality are ten-a-penny. If they aren’t willing to employ you as a person, only a number, then fuck ‘em. Go work your 16 hours somewhere else.

A Master of Arts

The amount of people going to university is on the rise, which is advantageous for a number of reasons. Number one, the more educated people are, the better. Graduates are skilled critical thinkers, no matter what their discipline; statistically, they are likely to be more conscientious socially and politically than those who did not attend university.

That said, a side effect of the growing HE sector is that universities are first and foremost operating as businesses, not as student-focussed institutions of education. I place most of the blame on our failing government, though, not universities themselves. Indifferent decisions are made by rich white men who have never had to struggle for anything (a topic for another blog, perhaps) to continue to increase fees for those who wish to better themselves academically. Every year, they slap a discouraging £9, 250 price tag on our learning. Why? To make sure that the working class stay working class. To keep everyone under their glass ceilings. Anyway, I digress.

As I mentioned, in spite of phenomenal increases in uni fees and students’ cost of living, university applications are flooding through UCAS like never before. That abstract idea of debt in excess of £30,000 is not scaring young people off because, let’s face it, what’s the difference between a lot of debt and a LOT of debt?

Regrettably, this means that more people than ever before have donned a cap and gown before entering the world of work. Jobs are fiercely competitive; degrees are judged not on individual merit but on the status of the institution. Many find themselves struggling to set themselves apart from the thousands of other graduates who join their ranks every year.

Now this is not an advert for The University of Gloucestershire, but they were actually very switched on to this. ‘Your Future Plan’ promoted internships, extra awards, employability conferences… You name it. There was a real pressure for us to add more than just an undergrad degree to our repertoire. And aren’t we thankful for it now! Largely thanks to them, over 95% of my fellow graduates have now entered full time work or further study.

I’m very grateful that I went to Gloucestershire, despite saying something to the opposite effect probably a million times in my first year. I weathered it out and really came in to my own in 2^nd year. I got a first – we graduated last Thursday. Thinking of the things I overcame to get there makes me deeply proud.

It is overwhelming how proud I am of my entire cohort, to be honest. I know that some of them struggled at times, too. They were all welcoming, caring and warm when I needed them, and I hope I was able to reciprocate in some ways.

Aman, Emily and Zo, thanks for battling through Lit and Lang with me – it may not have been the most organised course at UoG but we smashed it anyway! Alex, Meg and Nicole, thank you for making me feel like I fitted in. You have no idea how much I needed you three at the beginning of 2^nd year. Lauren, you are the most loving person I’ve ever met. Your kindness eased my stress time and time again. You all deserve the world, truly.

After graduation, I met with my ex-tutor, Arran, for catch up. On the way, still in my graduation dress, I stopped beside the lake in Pitville park. I have stopped at that same spot innumerable times over the past three years. I thought about all of this. Quite often, my thoughts in moments like these take the form of language, it’s just how my brain works. I’m writing some of them here.

I never walked to uni via the lake in first year, so the first picture was taken at the beginning of second year. The last was taken just after graduation.

Flash forward to today. I’m in Nottingham now, sitting in the uni café waiting to meet one of my MA teachers about doing a PhD (a PhD!!!!!!!). The application itself is several thousand words of work and I have deadlines coming up, too. Things aren’t perfect, though I’d have loved to finish this post off with ‘and they lived happily ever after’…

I miss home, more than I ever thought I would. My mum is an absolute soldier of a woman and I feel a little uneasy that she and Julian are over 100 miles away from me. My brother is struggling to manage his time just as I am, and it pains me that I can’t continue to be his best friend from here, at least not very effectively. I’m fortunate that he has Britt.

And, well, whenever I ring grandad he asks if I’ll come home. He counts days on his calendar until the next time I’ll see him. He pleads with me to not do my doctorate so that I can move back. I put off phoning him some days because I don’t feel strong enough to say no anymore and I’m worried I’ll just get in the car and go to him. It isn’t his fault, he’s just old. I miss him just as much as he misses me and will try my best to move home next year.

At the moment, Joel works full time (and more) at a primary school and I’m juggling three jobs, housework, uni work and PhD applications. Money is tight (which is a disgrace because a full-time job, part time jobs and student loans should be more than enough to survive). Joel’s football is becoming more serious which is great, but it means we see each other very little – maybe two evenings a week. I’m on my own a lot. It’s hard, I won’t pretend it isn’t, but I’m told life is a constant learning curve, aka an uphill battle...

I came here because I wanted to be a Master of English, but suddenly the stakes have gotten very high... Now I must master washing dishes, paying bills, driving across the country every fortnight, working a job in Clevedon and two in Nottingham, meeting deadlines, juggling relationships and getting accepted on to a PhD. I just can’t afford to drop a ball.

In the interest of ending on something positive, we recently adopted a gorgeous kitten, Tiger Lily, to keep me company and bring life and happiness to the house. She is playful and very very sweet; she follows me around and sits with me while I work on the laptop (a lot). I write a lot about the intrinsic value of non-human life in my essays so it feels weird to oversimplify it like this, but animals are the BEST.

"It's All Life, Pet"

“Why do you always speak like that to your grandad?”

This is the question I am asked every time I answer the phone to him in public, be it among work colleagues or friends from uni. They’re talking about the way I slow my voice and speak in broad Geordie (“it’s not bloody Geordie, we’re Mackems”, he would say) so that he can hear me.

It is strange. I’ve lived down south since I was young, but it isn’t just on the phone that I speak with my old accent, it’s every time I speak to grandad. When they ask this question, I usually reply “he’s deaf, he can hear me better this way,” but what I really mean is… It’s comforting. It’s something that is distantly familiar. It comes naturally to me to speak to grandad that way because it feels like home.

If you know me even vaguely then you know that grandad is the light of my life. He was the father I never had. The one who came to all of my school productions, cradled me when I cried (and told me he was gonna punch the person who did me wrong) and revelled in my successes more than anyone else, even me. He was the one who always showed up for me and Dan.

Since we were just babies, the role of our second parent was filled willingly by him and my nana, but sadly we lost her in 2008. As she was a central fixture in our lives and in grandad’s, we grew even closer to him in her absence. Many of my better qualities are a testimony to my grandad’s love for us. Above all else, my grandad is my angel because I know, in his heart, he is an honest and fundamentally good man.

I’m writing this post because recently, he has been forgetting things. He’s never really been the best at remembering birthdays and the like, he is a man after all, but lately he’s been unable to recall the day of the week, whether the oven’s on or off, the last time we saw each other, the house keys... To use his words, he gets ‘foggy’ when he tries to remember details.

I’m no doctor, but as I understand he is most likely in the early stages of a degenerative disease like dementia. Such a disease is not so much a possibility but a near certainty for someone as old as grandad (he hates it when I say he’s old but at 88 it’s getting harder and harder to not blame his myriad of ailments on general wear and tear).

I know it is far worse for some, many of them much younger than grandad, and this is not a post to say how depressing it is that he's losing bits of memory, quite the contrary in fact. I simply want to acknowledge it. As well as the memory issues, he is taking a substantial amount of medication, which can’t be helping things.

He can be troubled by it; he’s gotten so furious at times that he’s told me to get out of his house and never come back, which of course he doesn’t mean. I am patient with him (mum says I have the patience of a saint). I continue making lunch or watching TV and minutes later he will move on and ask if I want a cuppa. He can be unpredictable, but usually not in a negative way, he’s just very… random.

Equally, he can have really good days. He still does his carpentry in the garage, for one. Sometimes he meets my eyes and the glaze disappears altogether. He might say something cheeky (very grandad), or maybe he’ll be able to flawlessly recall something I told him on the phone yesterday and my heart swells.

He even wants to go to Zante. I am serious. One day in the summer we were sitting in the garden eating our lunch and he said his friends on the oil rigs used to talk about an island ‘off the back of the boot of Italy’. He said it was their favourite holiday destination. I tried and tried to figure out which island he was talking about – I even got google maps up on my phone and tried to show him all the places around Italy that it could be but, alas, we couldn’t work it out.

I moved on, shouting as always because he’s pretty deaf in his right ear (but won’t get a hearing aid because he’s a proud old Northern bloke). “GRANDAD – Me and Joel went sort of near Italy when we went away for my birthday. We went to a place called K E F A L O N I A in Greece. It’s next to ZANTE…” Well before I’d even finished my sentence his face lit up ‘ZANTE! IT WAS BLOODY ZANTE!”

So now we’re going to Zante. Not sure when, but when me and him went to Lanzarote a couple of years ago he was loving the beers, plus he wanted to come to the Loft last time I went out in Weston, so maybe he’ll love Laganas…

He’s still the funniest man I know, and he remembers everything from before Nana died like it was yesterday. As you may well know, things like dementia rarely permeate a person’s long-term memory, especially in the early stages.

He knows what she said to him when he won the football pools at the pub. He knows what their dogs and cats were called. He even knows his rifle number from his national service days. We are still really happy. One of his favourite sayings (among many MANY others) is ‘It’s all life, pet’.

Notably, there is far more to this blog post than I am disposed to write. His immediate family is in a bit of a mess, and though he will never admit it, I can see that it's contributing to grandad’s growing distress. I have a deep sense of bitterness about the fact that my own name (cheeky Charlie as he would say) has been smeared with hate and anger in others’ mouths, despite the fact that I have no interest in such business.

I only want him to be happy for the rest of his time here. That is all I have ever cared about. He and my nana know that to be true, and so I’ll continue to do whatever’s within my power to give him that happiness (at the moment it is going for a Costa - we took him once when he had a hospital appointment and he LOVED it. His is a 'drinking chocolate').

I promise I will help him remember when he is struggling to find the words, nana. I will make the most of our time together before you come to pick him up, because that is the best any of us down here can do.