This is Me
This is me, wearing a set of Roman armour designed for children to play with in the Roman Museum here in Canterbury. Why? you many ask, and “why not?” would have been my answer when the photo was taken. Now, almost a year and £9000 of student debt later, the answer is different.
Back when I was in Sixth-form we were expected to decide what we want to do in the future, and what degree or apprenticeship we would have to take in order to achieve our goals. Most people were sensible and chose degrees that most people would say lead to well paid, viable and stable jobs such as Mathematics, Business and Economics. Some chose degrees that were a little more risky when it came to employment, such as Architecture or Literature. And then there was me. I wanted to be a writer.
“Why would you do that to yourself, Dicks?” they would ask (with a last name like Dicks it becomes worryingly common for some people to refer to you by your surname), and I would answer by saying that it’s what I want to do and I thought I was good at it (I found out after doing a year of a Creative Writing course, I was not, in fact, good at it back then) and that I always had a sense of childhood imagination that stuck with me even as I grew older. A sense of imagination that I might as well make use of rather than sit in an office somewhere thinking about trolls and monsters when really I was just surrounded by coworkers and my boss (though there probably would have been little difference between my imagination and reality in that situation). They looked at me with some concern. “You know you’ll be poor for the rest of your life, right?” I paid little attention, citing authors such as Rowling and George R.R. Martin as proof that writing can earn people a living. Those two are, of course the exception, as most writers take on other jobs as freelance journalists or in other less glamorous fields such as retail to sustain themselves.
Most people went to universities not that far from home (home being Macclesfield, Cheshire) such as those in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Chester etc. Those that didn’t remain local tended to stay in Northern England. I ended up two hundred miles away, in Canterbury, Kent.
Moving to the South meant several things: trains home would be bloody expensive, arguments about the pronunciation of ‘glass’ and ‘bath’ were bound to, and have, come up and that summers would be almost goddamn unbearable.
Trains being expensive I could deal with — I just didn’t have to get a ticket home. What I didn’t expect was how everything is more expensive. Food, beer, unnecessary tat. Everything.
So this is me. A northern boy made poor by the cost of living in the south, melted by the heat and left mentally exhausted after debating so many times about how the north isn’t some backwater but is in fact the better part of the country. A northern boy who dreams too much and doesn’t as much time as he should writing those dreams down (though this is a problem I can and actually have worked on). And to answer the question of ‘why?’, there is only one answer: because you should do what you want to do to make yourself a happier, better person. Even if you do look like an idiot in the process.
Photo and name © Nathan Dicks, 2017.
