The Way We Were

My heart has been so full the past few days I have hardly been able to write. The Cambridge reunion was…everything it should have been in glorious technicolour. Fond, foolish, free, fucking fabulous and all the fs. It started with a message from my friend Adam in December before I received my diagnosis. There’s something significant about it having been in the diary as Something To Look Forward To for nearly half a year. Before all this. Before. Before what? Before I knew I was going to die. Let’s say it. But we are all, of course, dying. I just know it a little bit more than you do maybe. And, as a result, this weekend took on some greater significance. For although I plan to cheat death it seemed imminent for a while. Certainly for the month or two they had me believing it was lung cancer and that I only had a year or two left. Happily they were wrong and, even with seven tumours, metastatic breast cancer in your lungs and bones is a considerably better deal. I’m gonna live forever baby. But you can imagine, after January’s shocker and under the circumstances I went about the task of finding everyone with some enthusiasm thinking maybe this might be the last time I’d get to see everyone together. So if any of you are who were present this weekend are reading that’s why I spent time persuading some of you to come until the very last minute. It was important to me to get you all together. And you came in force. From Singapore, Malawi, Germany, France, Portugal, Switzerland, across America and all corners of the British Isles.

Adam, Pete and Neil had booked Old Hall on a rugby reunion six months previously in a moment of mad, drunken nostalgia no doubt. You can see Queens’ College’s 15th century hall in the picture with its gorgeous original William Morris painted ‘wallpaper’ in red, green and gold and all the Hogwarts vibes. But they’d forgotten to tell anyone or invite anyone. Boys eh? Could I help? As I was having a quiet weekend at an open studio event at the island I took my yearbook down and went to work finding people. It sounds odd but I like this sort of light investigative challenge. Maybe ADHD related. I relished stalking them all; working my network and tracking everyone down over a couple of months. We found 120 out of 148 in the first few weekends, got their numbers and added them to a whatsapp group. It’s pretty odd to find yourselves communicating as a group for the first time as we only just had email the year we left college so we’d never communicated en masse. Some didn’t want to be found. Some were unwell or said they simply didn’t do reunions. But, for me, this was the sort of event I dream of, regardless of illness.

I actually dream about being back at Cambridge often. Usually the exam dream but sometimes I’m back there at this age and starting again, slightly disoriented and finding they’ve built a shopping mall on the lawn with a slide or I am stuck there, separated from my family. I suppose psychologically it was the beginning of adult life for me, the foundation stone. And my mind returns there to explore new life stages when I’m in flux. It is lodged in my psyche. I even visit the Porters’ Lodge in my dream and look for my name to see if there are any messages in my pigeonhole.

Anyway, after much excited build up May 10th finally came around. I’ve kept in touch with a dozen or so people regularly but am hugely fond of the others. We were a small year group, outgoing and friendly and not very cliquey. A few of us transversed the various loose groups and this helped. Some close friends and I had rented an Airbnb. A beautiful 5 bedroom Victorian house with a pretty garden which served as a base for our friendship group to come and go and drink tea in the sunshine. I always navigate my life by plants and it was shrouded in purple wisteria which made my joy complete on arrival. We had a lazy Friday night as people gathered and a three hour punt on Saturday morning from Queens’ Mathematical Bridge to Grantchester which made for a good slow start. It was a stunning day and the River Cam glittered in all its green glory as we twisted our sleepy way through meadows, mature willow trees and blossom, ducking to avoid the odd branch and losing our punting poles occasionally in the deep parts. Some brave souls even ventured a bit of wild swimming. A punt is a great slow way to reflect on who we were then and catch up on what has happened in everyone’s lives in thirty years.

The chaps had taken charge of the dinner logistics and I‘d spent a comically busy week leading up to the reunion planning a daft awards ceremony in lieu of a traditional speech so that a few of us could present it together and acknowledge a wider group of people with a trip down memory lane. Typically it turned into more work than intended, making wooden spoon awards from gold material and green ribbon. Buying tiaras and writing a script with Pete, my co-presenter to put on gold cards. I’d invited people to nominate their friends and tell me their stories and memories a week or two before. Most involved diseases and drunken disasters so these needed categorising. It was worth it for 20 minutes of stupidity at the end of dinner and awards for Punishable Misdemeanours, Most Ridiculous Hospitalisation and Silliest Nickname. Plus my own more serious tribute to the glorious women in our year. All 40 of us. Out of 148. My Badass Btiches award. When I think about these women I am like a proud mother and I rave about their successes to anyone who’ll listen.

We are and were a privileged bunch in our year. Not in the way you might assume. Not to start with. Queens’ had a much higher proportion of non private school kids which is why I applied from my pretty average comprehensive in the first place. I took to the trappings of privilege like a duck to water of course thinking I had always deserved this and I gradually came to expect that life should always be like that. 1992 for me was like stepping into a movie and I felt a bit like Cinderella with a 3 to 4 year extension on midnight. One of my friends from West Belfast told me he’d never been to a restaurant before he arrived at college and I get it. I wasn’t far behind having only really experienced our local Italian in the sixth form, chinese restaurants with visiting relatives and the odd Harvester. My parents didn’t really like restaurants. It was a waste of money and my dad always believed he could cook better (he can!). But this is how privilege asserts itself over one’s life, through glitter and pleasure until it becomes normal. The magic of Cambridge is that it gets it in your head that that life belongs to you. A life of beauty, intellectual debate, fine dining, culture, drunken black tie dos, but also of being shown some respect by our patient tutors, of having a voice. It was a bit of a shock being pushed back out into the world after four years of this but the memory of that brainwashing was enough to carry me through the first few years following college before I clawed my way back to something proximate. And, of course. I now knew people with holiday homes in hot places and long driveways and connections. That network and that aspiration still serves me. It’s pretty simple. A great British institution tells you you’re worth it and you think ‘oh I’m worth it’. Class barriers overcome. Or are they? If you come from outside the establishment you will always suspect that you just ‘got away with it’ somehow. Like a thief or an imposter. I was telling someone about my PhD this weekend and they sussed that I thought I was indeed ‘still getting away with it’. My headstone will say ‘fooled ‘em’. Doesn’t matter how much you achieve. If you’ve been brought up with an outsider mentality you’ll always have that voice in your head. I think, for me at least, this feeling is a distant echo related to colonialism, centuries of dehumanisation of non-white Europeans, intergenerational trauma or what Angela McRobbie articulates as ‘lines of flight’. I can sit on all the boards of national institutions. Work for the BBC for years at a senior level, advise the British Council, the Arts Council, banks, broadcasters but I will never feel truly like I belong in any of them and I’ve turned that into an art. An Outsider Art. But essentially Cambridge crowned me with privilege. Like magic dust that was never really mine. A princess spell. A voice and the rather unappealing but necessary lesson in talking over people who try to silence you. It switches on when I meet men of a certain generation who seek to minimise me.

Our post dinner awards ended in a glittery wooden spoon and a tiara prize giving for men and women alike, delivered by the one and only Jimmy Carr, TV comedian extraordinaire. He didn’t actually go to Queens’ but we invited him as one of our own as he preferred our company and spent more time there than his own college seeing his school friends. An Honorary Old Queen. He’d lost his voice and so was elegantly given the job of unpacking the Amazon tiaras, crowning the winners and posing for photos. He then very generously took us all to the local nightclub for more mischief to scare the twenty somethings. Our night ended in Gardenias, Cambridge’s famous late night kebab shop, having a chip butty after witnessing Jimmy being chased down the street by drunk fans wanting selfies. He is extremely gracious to each and every one on the basis that it takes no more time to say yes and allow a photo than it does to tell them to fuck off. And to be fair he loves it and he’s grateful for the adulation. Why not? He’s worked hard for it. And he kindly bought me a chip butty while people stared at him eating a kebab. At 18, I remembered, I thought chips with mayonnaise was dead posh and quite novel. We waited for my dear friend Sarah to join us as it was her plan to end the night this way and I had a moment of serene happiness having satisfyingly broken every sensible promise to my oncologist to stay safe, wear a mask, not hug or kiss and presumably not to dance in a crowded nightclub with everyone breathing and sweating on you for four hours . I also wasn’t supposed to drink vodka. Oops.

After a week of medical anxiety I took a tactical decision to say fuck it and hug and kiss everyone, wear no mask at all and avoid wine which causes inflammatory havoc for me. I will never grow up. My neutrophil levels, the white blood cells that fight infection were very low the day before we arrived at 1.7. If they get as low as 1.5 or 1 it’s classed as neutropenia and risky as your body can’t fight infection but I told myself that the endorphin release would compensate. I hasten to add this is not medically proven but today’s blood tests were a testament to that as my neutrophil levels went back up. So there. But let’s see what the week brings. I feel pretty well.

In other news I had a call from my consultant on the way to Cambridge to tell me that my primary lung tumour has shrunk from 2.5cm to 1.8cm in the first weeks of treatment which is unusual. I am jubilant as they told me shrinkage was possible but not a given. No growth is a win. And although this is not a controlled experiment, I feel it also has something to do with Seka, the energy healer. I hope to see her again.

The curious thing about this reunion as opposed to 12 years ago and 2O years ago was how healing it was. I use that word carefully but we all seemed to be in a similar group delusion. Or energetic space. People seemed more relaxed and at ease with themselves and others than at previous gatherings. Seeing each other again through 51/52 year old eyes helped. I think we were all prepared to take each other as we are now and not for who we thought we were then or expected each other to be. There was an air of post-career or late career shrug and a theme of people changing tack later in life and spending more time with family, finding second careers, finally doing what they loved. It was forgiving and enriching. And I think those that came with anxiety about who they were then found themselves forgiving their 19/20 year old selves. One friend (who once impressed me by telling me he was ‘not defined by his gender boundaries’ as an advanced human male aged 19) reported having conversations this weekend with some of the men who we would have perceived as lads back then, public school types, talking about how they’d struggled with the culture of rather toxic masculinity that went with being that guy in the 90s. Children change things. Bringing up daughters especially.

All in all it was beautiful and life affirming and so much more than I’d expected. There was a real gentleness. I’ll try to make it to the next one. Or just do them more regularly.

Monday morning brought me full circle. I met a young woman for lunch to try to support her in her career. I met Claudia (hi Claudia!) in Issey Miyake on a day when I was feeling fortunate. She asked if I was half Chinese. There’s a funny moment between mixed heritage people where we clock each other. I found out she was hoping to start her career in the media and we had a quick chat where I offered to help. I am always sympathetic to this predicament as I remember how hard it was getting started with no contacts. It took me two years to get going and I was convinced tv jobs were for other people and all the big talk about how Oxbridge gives you a leg up was crap. Once you’re back out on the street you’re still just a mediocre Chinese Indian immigrant’s kid from the suburbs. But it happened eventually after a lot of persistence I spent 25 happy years in my chosen career before I’d had enough. As we talked I marvelled at how similar we are in our interests and, without being presumptuous (dear Claudia) I felt like I was meeting myself 26 years ago. And I have time to help. So if any of you has a job going for a brilliant young writer, photographer and researcher who speaks Mandarin and loves social justice (not me, her) please let me know. I’d hire her in a heartbeat. As we parted she gave me the book she has just finished reading, bell hooks ‘All About Love’ and it felt like a sign. For in the end that’s all we’ve got. But it is, I’m fairly sure, all we need.