Adios Amigo!

So in 1991 I left the Parks Department to go and begin a degree course at the University of Glamorgan. Once again without a plan, like a cork on the waves, tossed about from place to place I chose a general Arts Degree. The only reason I was accepted was that I had gained an A level in English at night school when I was still in North Wales. Whilst living with Mrs Bailey in York Street, Colwyn Bay, I went twice a week to study A levels in Llandrillo College. A BA in Humanities at Trefforest was to introduce me to the field in which I am still passionate to this day. Drama. I graduated in 1994 majoring in Theatre & Media Drama. I studied for the whole three years whilst self medicating my Manic Depression. Clwb Ifor Bach on a Saturday night with its sticky floors and plastic glasses. I was that much older than the other students 25 when I started and 28 when I finished and from there I went straight to Caerleon to study a Post Graduate Certificate in Further Education. By completing the degree course I was trying to prove to myself that I was not such a failure after all. Interestingly there is no psychological profiling required to enter the teaching profession and I never mentioned to anybody in those days that I had had 'an episode' whilst younger. Learning about Teaching was tough, as similar to Drama, what I was attempting to do was to work against my default setting of being shy and withdrawn. It required you to be outgoing as you were working with people. It was an effort. An effort that needed anaesthetising. 

Whilst working for the Parks in 1989, my interest in Politics began and I took a weeks holiday to go and leaflet and canvass for Dr Dewi Evans, the Plaid Cymru Candidate in the Neath By-election. He was opposing the Labour candidate Peter Hain. I believe that my passion for Plaid Cymru came from the fact that it was emotion based. It was when the Party was more of a protest party rather than the mainstream affair it is today. I was exorcising the ghost of my English Medium education by becoming a Welsh Language and Culture activist. In my purple blazer, I had joined Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg in Eisteddfod yr Urdd in Rhyl in the early nineteen eighties. I was training to become a Teacher to be a better Teacher than the ones that I had. To be somebody who would have empathy with a young person growing up. 

At University we studied a broad base of subjects for the degree and I remember a Lecturer in History called Neil Wynne who had become aware of my politics and it seemed to irk him somewhat. In those days I was pretty active, canvassing, leafletting, standing as Council Candidate in Cardiff South and Penarth and going to a number of summer schools. There had been an election in 1991 and a gang of us had gone up to Ceredigion to support Cynog Dafis who was the joint Plaid/Green candidate. At University, Mr Wynne went round the seminar group and asked each one of us why we had voted in the election. Halfway round he came to me and my response was 'Language and Culture'. "Aha" he announced with relish as if catching me in a trap "That's what Hitler's followers were voting for in the lead up to the war". He was trying to equate Nationalism with Fascism and what made it obvious that it was a set up was that he stopped the questioning with me and left the other half of the seminar group with their mouths agog having been denied the opportunity to answer. It had been a mistake to choose history as this gentleman brought my marks right down at the end of the course and if it hadn't been for a distinction in Drama then my final grade would not have been the 2:1, I finally achieved. Mr Wynne was obviously not to know that I was a Manic Depressive but this little episode was to lead to a confirmatory bias in my mind, that there were individuals who seemed to take a pleasure in belittling others or pulling the metaphorical rug out from underneath you. There was another lecturer who diminished my enjoyment of another topic, Creative Writing, a Professor of Poetry no less, Monsieur Tony Curtis of Barry, a lecturer with a bombastic manner who reduced some members of his classes to tears with his observations and critiques and was not very encouraging. In tutorial he said that my poetry " was clench fisted" and was not too his taste at all.

At this point, my Mental Health was triggered mostly by other people and their behavior and reactions. I would either rise up and rage very quickly or more commonly withdraw and brood like an old hen, neither reaction was very healthy really.