My Year Off Read Online Free PDF

College, Cambridge. Before I went to up to university, I spent eighteen months odd-jobbing (in England), drifting and travelling (in Europe), and ended up teaching English at Geelong Grammar School, in Victoria, Australia, where I learned more in one year than in the previous ten put together. After that I settled down for a while to three happy years at university, where I directed plays (including an adaptation of Flann O’Brien’s
At Swim-Two-Birds
, cheekily billed as a World Première) at the Edinburgh Fringe, wrote an unpublishable novel (moving from du Maurier to Beckett with none of the usual intervening stages either of wit or wisdom), achieved my degree, and secured a postgraduate Thouron scholarship to the University ofPennsylvania in Philadelphia. My American year gave me an unconscious appetite for the United States that I was at pains subsequently to satisfy, and with happy consequences I could never have predicted.
    Eventually, having recognized that I was not cut out for the groves of academe, or even the high tables of Oxbridge, I came home, and by some kind of fortune got a job, first as publicity assistant and then as in-house reader with the then independent publishers Chatto and Windus. I had been proud of my decision to look for postgraduate work in the United States, but in truth I was hardly deviating from a well-trodden academic racetrack. Even in London, the habits of school and university died hard. I sat in the library in my lunch hours and toiled away on another work of fiction, a perfectly dreadful comic novel, now happily lost, about a young man slaving away in a public library during his lunch hours. When I think of it today, I recall Dr Johnson’s famous put-down: ‘Your work is both good and original. Unfortunately, the part that’s good is not original, and the part that’s original is not good.’
    Like almost everyone of my background and upbringing, the only unresolved questions of my twenties were: when, and to whom, would I get married? and what job would I get? These questions were both answered in April 1979, when I became engaged to my university girlfriend and was taken on as a senior commissioning editor with the publishers Faber & Faber. Thus, in the space of a few weeks, my course was set. After a number of false starts, I now published several works of fiction — from
In The Secret State
(1980) and
The Fabulous Englishman
(1984) to
Mainland
(1992),
Jubilee
(1994) and
Suspicion
(1996) — and also, from 1982 to 1986 collaborated with the renowned broadcaster Robert MacNeilon a television history of our language,
The Story of English
.
    Apart from my insignificant private struggle as a young writer in Westminster Public Library, mine was a quintessentially English upbringing of extreme security and considerable privilege. After one night in a hot, noisy, chaotic National Health Service ward of University College Hospital, I realized how much I’d come to take this sort of special treatment for granted. In the next hospital to which I would be transferred, I had a private room, the reward for twenty years of Faber-sponsored BUPA (British United Provident Association) private healthcare subscriptions. Later, as the days stretched to weeks, I discovered the limitations on BUPA’s healthcare package: the final weeks of my illness were devoted to a daily renegotiation of my right to health care as the hospital managers haggled over the cost of my room with chilly BUPA administrators, a quite different breed from the smiling and nurturing Florence Nightingales offered to the public in the television advertisements. (In the end, after some argy-bargy, BUPA came to honour their commitments.)
    As I read over what I’ve just written, I’m struck by the way in which so much of my early life seems to point in some odd way towards the moment of my stroke. Of course, I know this is nonsense, that our fortune is tied up with fragility and contingency, and yet, there it is: my profound