A long time ago, I learnt the word ‘oxymoron’ and fell in love with the sound of it. In thinking about how best to write this page, it occurs to me that I might have somehow become it.
I identify as a woman and have been an avowed feminist since I was five years old, yet put me in a dress and I feel like I’m in drag. Don’t even get me started on high heels or make-up. Also, there’s no such thing as a male feminist, so you can miss me with that.
I have an acute case of wanderlust and have lived in four countries so far, yet I am also a hoarder of books (let’s not talk about my four sewing machines and enormous fabric stash). When I finally get to where I’m going, I’ll have an awful lot of stuff. I don’t know where it is precisely that I am going, but I do know that Britain has never, ever been my home. I also know that when I get there, it’ll be warm, have terra rosa, and have mountains I can see while I’m swimming in the sea.
I spent eleven years and two months slogging my guts out to get a PhD (including my undergraduate and masters degrees and poverty induced time outs), just to see if I could. Guess what? I could, and I could well, and now I’ve had to move on as the world has absolutely no use of a working-class historian who doesn’t want to teach. Moral of this story is that I’m stubborn beyond all belief, but at least I have the coolest name in the universe.
That’s just three things, but they are important things, and they somehow cover most of the essence of me.
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