Racing the Charge

I want to write a little bit about yesterday evening but the laptop's running out of charge: I might get there...

I was invited to speak to a group of students from Stuttgart by their lecturer, Geoff, who has added a module on punk to their English and History course. I agreed wholeheartedly to do it, based on the idea that really January is best spent re-setting everything, and if that involves other people all the better.

In the freezing back bar of their hostel near Tavistock Square (and completely unprepared), I talked a bit about my book and about what it felt like to start up a punk band in the 1970s, and to do that from the perspective of being female, a female who didn't feel like an woman and who couldn't relate to the second wave of feminism at the time (while appreciating it's campaigning), because I didn't see myself as a woman-body.

The students asked really interesting questions, and the talk drifted into all sorts of other areas, covering fear, abuse, the importance of creativity and the imagination, and the use of hope as a pushback against control and oppression. And of course, communities and intersectionality.

There was something really cathartic about being in the room with a bunch of young learners and their curiosity. Bundled up in thick jackets they sat at long tables, and I stood in front of them. But it felt as though we were exploring something together, rather than me talking and them listening. They asked so many great questions! The best one was at the end: 'Where did you get those shoes?'.

I know they are at Reading University meeting the punk scholar Matthew Worley today, and I hope they have the same effect on him. I felt gratitude to Geoff for inviting me to meet his students, and I wish them all the best for the rest of their studies and the exciting lives they are going to lead with all that knowledge and curiosity!