A new beginning

Audley End, Essex

It's been a long time since I've written anything to share with the world.

I first started writing under the Book Snob name when I was in my early twenties, stuck in a dull office job, disappointed by adulthood and wondering what had happened to my dreams of a life filled with creativity.

I escaped to New York for a year, came back to London, trained to be a teacher, and for a while, found joy in sharing my love of literature with my students. But slowly, somehow, the joy started to ebb away as my ideals of what I wanted my classroom to be came into conflict with the reality of what the education system demands. Rather than inspiring children, I was teaching them how to pass tests and being forced to pile on the pressure to constantly strive for better grades. It was soul destroying. All I wanted to do was read lovely books together and talk about our feelings; instead, I was a drill sergeant, drumming quotations into their heads until they became meaningless.

The pandemic finished me off; I left teaching after nine years, and went back to university to allow the creativity laying dormant inside me to be released. I had a wonderful time playing, making, creating - but when the course was over, I felt lost. I couldn’t see where was next for me. After a couple of months of anxious leisure, I took a job in a theatre, but soon I could barely get out of bed in the morning. Once again, my ideals came into conflict with reality. This space, that should have been about collaboration and creativity and community was really just about making money. There was no joy in that building, only disillusionment and frustration.

At my lowest point, I took a holiday of a lifetime to Zambia and Zimbabwe, thanks to a generous gift from my lovely dad. On my first night, sitting out on the verandah overlooking the Zambezi, watching the stars (while trying not to get ravaged by mosquitoes) and listening to the gorgeous night sounds of the wild animals who called this stretch of paradise home, I felt true peace for the first time in years. Seeing the freedom of the animals, the vastness of the landscape, the darkness and depth of the skies where we haven’t spread our concrete and glass tentacles of capitalism, made me realise how little anything I worried about all the time really mattered in the grand scheme of a world that is really quite indifferent to my presence. From that knowledge of my insignificance came peace, and from that peace, came clarity.

Fast forward a few months, and I am back in the classroom, but with a difference this time. Gone is the pressure to be changing the world, to be railing against the system. I have a curriculum to teach, and I teach it as well as I can, with as much passion and love as I can in the time I have with the children in front of me. I won’t make a difference to every child. I will not give every child a love of literature to last a lifetime. I don’t need to bend over backwards and tie myself in knots to try and achieve those things, because they’ll never happen, I have accepted that, and I am ok with it. There is lots of laughter and joy and creativity, alongside lots of frustration and boredom and irritation. It is not a perfect job, but it is a pretty good way to pay the bills. I get to leave work at 4.30 and walk home through the streets of central London. I have time in the evenings to see friends, to go to the cinema and theatre, to wander in and out of bookshops in the rapidly descending dusk of late September, to cook nice meals and read books curled up on the sofa and practice the piano. On the weekends I have started having one day where I visit somewhere new. I am finding joy in so many unexpected places. A life of simple pleasures is not to be underestimated.

It’s been a tough few years, mentally, I’m not going to lie - but I feel like I am finally emerging back into the light again, to a place of balance and purpose and joy. And being in this place has brought me back to why I started writing in the first place; not for fame or glory, but for community. I have missed that. And so here I am, ready to talk about books and art and theatre and London and all the other things that take my fancy. I’m looking forward to sharing my life with people again.

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