The luxury of second chances

Latin saved my life. Sort of. My ramshackle, bohemian upbringing (heroin addict father, alcoholic mother) didn’t offer much in the way of security, so I found comfort in the orderly pages of a Latin primer. It was a shock all round when I went to Cambridge to study classics — first to my parents, both of whom had left school at 14, and to me, an urban latchkey kid who learnt that actually what she really loved was lawns and libraries. I discovered a new version of myself when I went to university.
Still, life was too wild for me to consider staying on after my degree. My mum was selling the flat in Battersea where I had grown up, moving into a bedsit (impoverished by my dad’s decadence) and Dad had moved in with his teenage girlfriend. I had to get a job, get a home, invent myself anew. I found a new passion: journalism. I loved the frenetic pace, the sense of always being engaged with the world, of being in an industry populated by the most interesting, fun, clever people. Still, in a different life, one in which I’d been given the chance to breathe, thrive rather than simply survive, I think I might have tried to be an academic.
Then, in 2019, over 20 years later, a concatenation of circumstances resulted in me starting a part-time master’s degree in Renaissance intellectual history at London’s Warburg Institute. It was a delight to me to fire up those dormant parts of my brain, to escape to a library full of old books — many of which were in Latin. I wrote essays on alchemy and the esoteric symbolism of Elizabeth I’s jewellery. I translated a utopian text written by a 16th-century monk astrologer. It felt like a gift to my younger self, a version of the life that she had wanted but been unable to follow.
And now I am doing a part-time PhD (on Tudor mythographers). It’s hard work and sometimes my brain aches from having to creak between my different worlds — academic, journalistic. But this second chance feels like the most wonderful of luxuries.