Leafy fantasy meets urban reality

And every day is a school day...

When I moved to the UK from the US many years ago, I joined my partner who returned to an academic position after 10 years in environmental consultancy (or ‘consulting’ in US language). I had a rather romantic idea of what being an academic partner would be like based on absolutely no experience and only a few novels and Hollywood movies. In my imaginary new life we would have lovely smart people over for small dinner parties and interesting conversations, and we would develop a close circle of life-long friends. Pete and I would have relaxed evenings together and stroll around a leafy campus to enjoy all the cultural offerings that come with university life and all would be rosy. Well.

The first affront to my imagination was that we were living in a city near a very urban campus with little greenery. No strolling through a leafy campus. Not to say there weren’t lovely places in Plymouth, but they weren’t part of the campus. Luckily we lived on the edge of a green park with a few trees, but the surrounding area was densely urban complete with gulls and pigeons fighting over spilled trash bags as decor.

The life of an academic is also anything but relaxed (news to no one but me, apparently) and there are very few evenings that aren’t taken up with more marking or research or administrative tasks that can’t get completed during long days of teaching and meetings. So, the next thing I took off the fantasy list was our relaxed evening strolls, and a busy cultural social calendar.

Next on my fantasy list: most dinner parties, with the exception of our annual Thanksgiving party, were not proper sit-down dinner parties at all. Usually ‘dinner’ followed many drinks after work on Fridays at the on-campus pub, whereupon everyone decamped back to our flat since it was big and close to campus. We would order pizzas or eclectic asian food and more beers and drinks would be consumed. A lovely rollicking group of young lecturers, post-doctoral students and their partners and some staff would eat, drink and be merry. The older faculty (and no, they didn’t wear tweed jackets and elbow patches) usually couldn’t come because of course they had children and families and were off at their own houses far away from campus on a Friday evening. 

All of this socialising was great fun of course, but it was a completely different version of the academic socialising that my Hollywood imagination had outlined. I should also point out that Pete and I are not young post-graduates or early career academics. We both had 20-plus year careers behind us at this point, so hanging out with the cool kids was certainly fun, but it was not our usual peer group. In particular, since I was not an academic, I missed having women friends who were more business or commercially oriented.

Finally, my other romantic view that we would make many life-long academic friends was upended when I learned that since there are limited positions in each university especially at the early career stage, when people change jobs, they pretty much change locations too, and off they go. Since our first friends in Plymouth were Pete’s younger colleagues at the University, after a couple of years, I realised that our friends would come and go on a regular and fairly rapid basis. I learned to enjoy the people we knew whilst they were there, because often they were gone within a year. There was very little time to develop the deeper friendship ties that take a sustained amount of effort and activities to create strong bonds.

Slowly I made my own friends outside the university, including several women business owners, but l learned turnover happens outside the university too, as many people leave Plymouth to look for more work, or better work, or just to try out life in bigger cities. Fortunately people migrate here as well, either returning from the big cities to be close to family or raise their family, or they have come here on holidays for years and now want to live here year round to enjoy the relaxed and calmer quality of life. People coming and going just became the norm in our life in Plymouth. 

Of course, since we were the ones to move away from our lives in California, we are also part of the ebb and flow of people movement around the planet. Do you think movement from place to place is a good thing? Is there a right amount or better timing of movement? What feelings does moving bring up with you? These are all questions (and many more!) that I have been thinking about and hope to dive in more here in the future. I’d love to know what you think and what you’d like to hear more about (and contribute to)!