What’s something you’ve done that your past self would be proud of?
Getting into Balliol College, Oxford, to read Modern History.
My seventeen-year-old self would have been thrilled. Possibly astonished.
In October 1978, I had just started at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, after three years boarding at Sedbergh. I had dropped A-level Economics in favour of History, joining the course seven weeks late. I was behind with the reading, the notes and the essays. My initial grades were hardly encouraging: Cs and Ds.
How on earth did I turn that around?
Determination, certainly. But also learning how to learn.
I began asking teachers what I needed to do to improve. I caught up on seven weeks of notes, filled lever-arch files, read with a notebook beside me and gradually developed the ability to construct an argument rather than simply reproduce information.
My Geography teacher, Mr Rhodes, once returned an essay with the devastating comment, ‘This will not do.’ I spent much of half-term rewriting it, filling an entire exercise book. A lesson in persistence, research and the importance of making a convincing argument from evidence.
Gradually, Cs and Ds became Bs and As.
What makes me particularly proud is that I didn’t abandon everything else. I was swimming competitively, acting at the People’s Theatre, playing music, drawing and painting, and discovering the joys and agonies of teenage relationships.
I wanted to be a scholar-athlete, an artist, a performer and a historian. I wanted it all.
In December 1980, two years after that uncertain beginning, I received an offer from Balliol College to read Modern History.
I had achieved something that, at seventeen, had seemed impossibly ambitious.
But there is another part to this answer.
My younger self would be pleased to discover that I never stopped learning. More university degrees followed, including postgraduate studies in education, communications and history. I became a teacher, writer, editor, swimming coach and, eventually, a town councillor.
I’ve spent much of my life pursuing whatever happens to capture my curiosity, often studying several subjects simultaneously. I’ve learned to ski, developed my photography and drawing, returned repeatedly to swimming and coaching, and explored how digital technology can transform education.
Throughout (from age 13) I kept diaries, journals and then blogs (since 1999) recording the ordinary and extraordinary business of ‘being human’.
Indeed, I’m now spending several hours each day revisiting and reconstructing the diaries I wrote as a teenager, discovering what that ambitious, frequently confused, occasionally infuriating seventeen-year-old was thinking.
There’s something rather wonderful about this: the boy who wanted to study History at Oxford has become an older man investigating his own life as an historian using his diaries as primary material. (I’ve done this as an historian with diaries and letters from the 17th and 20th centuries).
Would my seventeen year old self be proud?
I think so.
Not because everything went according to plan. It certainly didn’t. There have been disappointments, wrong turns, failures and painful lessons.
But I’ve remained curious, physically active, intellectually engaged and willing to begin again.
At seventeen, I wanted to make the most of my life.
At sixty-five, I’m still trying.
And I think he’d be rather pleased with that.
And! The desire to be married one day, have a couple of kids, a dog and a people carrier! It wasn’t at Renault Espace, and she wasn’t a Black Labrador, but the rest of it has defined be for at least twenty years.
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