Perfect Porridge

i didn't do a phd but i can make oats!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I know it’s autumn because I have two urges: to eat a lot of porridge, ideally with golden syrup, and to do a PhD.

Here they come, the end of September, the desire to fuel myself with oats and write either the great thesis in defence of romantic fiction, or to go headlong into Ulysses and live there until spring, forcing all my unruly undergraduate theories on the subject into neat little arguments. Partly this is because I have been recording the audiobook of In Love With Love this week— in a tiny windowless room big enough for me, a mic, and my own book— and the walk to the studio was along the river and then the Strand and curving up that beautiful wide curve at Aldwych to cut straight up Kingsway to Charing Cross Road and Chinatown and the Tottenham Court Road and Soho, and it was all full of beautiful young people with scarves on looking fresh and new and eager and afraid, and beautiful older people with jumpers and glasses and lanyards looking frantic, and I remembered a time when I had been one of those beautiful young people and there had seemed no way at all I would ever be able to remember the ways the streets of central London joined up.

That person had very recently given up the dream of becoming one of those people with the lanyards. I wanted to be an academic all the way through school, kind of as a way to make “I am going to write" more palatable to an adult audience. But I had recently endured a medium-small humiliation from a teacher, and it had ballooned in my mind to a Fuck You. There were ways I could have got round the humiliation, and still become an academic. There were many ways! But it was far from my first altercation with adults, and a) what would academia be, but loads of bloody teachers, and b) I was tired of trying to make them feel better. I was going to be a writer. So off I went to university, determined to use the time wisely and write a book. I wrote Midnight Chicken. Then I went off the rails; then my boyfriend died.