Prelude.
In the last blow out days of student life freedom, returning from a sun-drenched Glastonbury Festival headlined by The Cure, Pulp and Oasis, onto a Jesus & Mary Chain show in Manchester, arriving back in Stoke-On-Trent for graduation at Staffordshire University, for the award of a degree in International Policy & Administration, with a first-class dissertation on human rights. Having been told many times by hierarchical figures, teachers and family members, an arts degree would not get me a job, and ‘everyone needed a job’, ‘a job to pay your way’, I finally held a degree with honours in line for a vocation, or so I was told.
I was the first in my family to seize the once impossibility of a university education. My escape from the rural backwater of my childhood had given me connection to opportunity, people, places, culture, and importantly, a broader view of the world, and its possibilities. Everything previous generations of my family had deserved, but were refused either by circumstance, or brought up to think unworthy of. Families like mine built our nation while others profiteered.
Higher education helped build my confidence and sense of self-worth. For my peers and I, the realities of limited prospects, unemployment, job searches, bad bosses, burn-out, bills, debts, taxation, and struggle, awaited us all. We were young. We had no fucking idea in the beautiful innocence of youth. The economic need to surrender to conformity would soon come calling. We would have to battle harder for anything we still believed in and felt worthy of.
Music was interwoven into all facets of my life. My tastes reflected my appearance, connections, and deep-down if I was honest with myself, my aspirations.
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