Very few people will go knocking down my door in protest--Coventry is a city bereft of charm. It's a constant reminder of the 1950s post-war rebuilding project. Concrete block after concrete block surround a roundabout in the flat slab of ruin that remains. There are shops and everything, don't get me wrong. But if you could imagine the worst of what American suburbia meets English weather has to offer, you've got Coventry.
It doesn't help that the university lies neatly between the middle of two nowheres, not quite in Coventry and not quite anywhere else. Royal Leamington Spa, a 25-minute fluorescent pink bus ride away, is its closest smug, wannabe-London cousin and happens to be the home of half the university's student population. With its cute little high street and 'Royal' status because the queen came to visit some time in the mid-1900s, it thinks itself a little higher than it is. Leamington had a lot of noses in the air in its short little high street. A lot of students with a lot of money and a lot of pretensions.
So I guess it comes as no surprise that I hated just about every minute of life in that place. I started my MA at Warwick, which housed the nation's third best English Programme, feeling very much like a minnow caught in an ocean current being dragged to the ends of the earth. I was depressed, limiting my activities to eating biscuits, watching Cash in the Attic at precisely 12 noon daily and using reference books to read the myriad indecipherable articles, journals and postcolonial novels my professors threw in my direction. I had few friends, my lecturers were aloof and protective of their research and the closest creature comfort of a city was a £45, 1.5 hour journey on the train.
Almost immediately, and unspectacularly, my no-longer-long-distance relationship began to crumble. Little things really, but we hung on. The fireworks came later, way later. But first I finished my MA and moved to London for a job. We stayed together fighting the inevitable. Going back and forth for the 'distance years' was dreadful--trains from London to Leamington on Friday nights and the reverse on Sunday evenings. Trading off London and Leamington weekends, trying to juggle our differing lifestyles. It continued on and on and on for two years. And then we broke up.
Clutching at the pieces of myself that remained, I vowed never to go back.
But three years later, Warwick in Africa happened. Shakily, shakily I braved the elements. Carrying the demons along, I boarded a train back to Coventry. Back to Warwick University to interview and then take part in a summer teaching programme in Ghana. To work with a group of master teachers who would deliver Professional Development Sessions across the African continent. I will admit, the first three train rides, I shook. Physically, not metaphorically. To the point that the people around me looked a bit concerned. They took other seats.
But here I am again sitting on a train--my sixth or seventh journey back. I've stayed for the weekend at a friend's house in Leamington. I survived it. And I know this sounds dramatic and probably a bit over the top, but it's been a hell of a journey. I will never love, or like, this place and I will never move here. But I've finally made Warwick University work for me. I've met inspiring educators and peers whom i've had the privilege of learning from. I have friends who get it. They get me. They get education. They get ambition. I'm networking. I'm remembering why I'm in education--because that easily gets lost in the bureaucracy of the day-to-day.
It's been my biggest, longest, most arduous journey. Humbly, I'm grateful.
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