I wasn’t a swot exactly, but I loved to learn and was never without a book.
When I was a little girl in Waterford, I was clever.
And I’ve gladly indulged the idiot savant fantasies of over-educated, upper-class arts professionals who find my educational vacuum (relatively unusual for an arts writer) to be refreshing and winningly salt-of-the-earth. I’ve felt, too, a terrible and consuming grief for what might have been, had I not been too stupid. In that decade, I’ve felt vicious hatred toward academia and pre-emptive disdain for all the snobs I imagine to be hiding inside it. It’s 10 years since I dropped out of university. “Now that – that – is interesting,” she said, jabbing her finger across the table. “Oh, I didn’t,” I replied breezily, “I dropped out.”įinally, I had caught her interest. “Ask me, ask me, ask me,” I begged her inside my head, and then she did. Then, while she was re-checking her email, she muttered something about having to attend her reunion at Cambridge. The curator looked at her phone more than she looked at me, making me increasingly anxious about my lack of engaging wit, so that eventually I was mugging and pantomiming like a tragic clown to an unresponsive audience. This particular meeting was not going well. You work a career-highlights reel into supposedly casual conversation, aiming to appear thrilling, and charismatic, and sexy enough that the curator, or commissioner, or editor might wish to purchase some of your cultural capital. There is rarely a particular reason specified for meetings of this kind, no promise of material reward, yet you nevertheless trek into central London, spend three hours and £7 you can’t afford, and try to be your best, most charming self. It was one of those inconvenient midweek interludes most people who work in the arts must endure, a vague invitation extended by someone with money and opportunities. L ast year, I was having coffee with a curator, a person from whom I hoped to extract paid work at some point.
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