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A formative event in my life?
The temptation when asked this is to pick something that corresponds to the self-constructed identity that I like to project. So, we can consider the occasion around the time of the Moss Side riots of 1981 when as a small child I stood and watched two policemen beating a homeless man in a shopping arcade, or passing the picket lines of the Miner’s Strike in 1984 or something along these lines.
Yet, fundamentally, this would be dishonest. Really, events like this changed little in my life.
A truer event, that avoids the posturing of the above suggestions, would be my trip to Lisbon in 1998. This trip really did alter the course of my life.
At the time, I was a penniless, angry art student living on the “mean streets of Moss Side”. My college organised an EU backed exchange with a design school in Lisbon.
I forget how I felt in the build-up. All I remember from that time is the difficulty I was having getting a passport. Fortunately, my tutor lent me the money for the fees, and eventually I was on a plane to Lisbon.
Almost immediately upon arrival, and I do remember this absolutely clearly, I felt a huge sense of relief. Enormous. The emotion of having a great pressure lifted from my shoulders was overwhelming. I cannot put my finger upon why this was the case, but it was one of the strongest emotions I have ever felt – utter, profound relief.
At one point, I expressed this physically through a little act of ritual. At the westernmost point of Europe I picked up a rock, gathered up all my anger, my stresses, my pain squeezed it into the rock and hurled it as far into the Atlantic as I could.
From that moment on I was decided. I was going back. I was going to leave the UK and move to Portugal. I wasn´t going to struggle anymore.
In 2001 I moved to Porto as an Erasmus scholar at the University there.
Prior to this however, I
…to be continued
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