Why did I choose Bangor to read Maths? I was in the library at my college, in Blackburn, working through the folders of universities. I started at “A”, skipped over Aberdeen (too far), ruled out Aberystwyth (too difficult to spell), moved on to “B” – and didn’t need to look any further. Growing up in an urban Northern town, seeing the mountains, lakes and forests of north Wales was enough to know I’d found where I wanted to spend the next three years.
Almost as an aside, it also helped that Bangor’s maths degree was perfectly pitched to my interests, which lay heavily in the abstract pleasures of pure maths. Sadly, the maths department is no more, but back then it was an amazing place to be.
Astonishingly, I didn’t go to an Open Day, instead putting all my faith in the promise of the prospectus. In September, my brother drove me down in a hired van stuffed to the gills with bedding and books. I had to stop my mother from sending me away with a towering stack of pans – she wasn’t convinced the catering of Neuadd Reichel hall of residence would cut it.
To be fair to her, being in a catered hall wasn’t easy. Coming from a Muslim household, my tastes were catholic. I ate chicken and lamb, but only halal, and in curry form. Vegetarian food was still a rarity outside of the big cities. Yet, somehow, the catering team managed to source halal chicken in the wilds of north Wales. Most evenings, I’d be served a breast of overcooked roast chicken, unveiled from under a cloche, with an assortment of unseasoned boiled veg. It would have been churlish to complain.
Having not left home before, university life was a culture shock. Apart from the food (where I encountered such exotic fare as cheese, mushrooms, courgettes and Dolmio sauce), I learned how other people lived. In my second year, I shared a student house on Upper Garth Road with six others. I discovered that English people didn’t rinse their dishes after washing up, tea was made in a kettle rather than the chai Mum made on the hob, and toast had butter spread after the bread was toasted (I was used to toast made from bread dabbed with butter first and then slapped on to a hot griddle).
When I wasn’t number-crunching, I got involved with the student newspaper, Y Seren, as a way of balancing my logical brain with something more creative. I wrote all kinds of pieces, from news stories about a power plant touted for Trawsfynydd, reviews of shows at Theatr Gwynedd (igniting a lifelong love of the arts), to an interview with David Icke (this should have been more interesting than it was, as he never answered a question directly and used a thousand words when ten would have done).
After graduating, I came to London and took a postgraduate diploma in Journalism. My time at Y Seren had made me realise I wanted to work with words, not numbers. I was a journalist for several years, specialising in children’s and young women’s magazines. Eventually, I accepted that journalism wasn’t going to afford me a foot on the housing ladder. So, I joined a City law firm as a temp. I never left.
In the last five years I’ve begun writing again, this time fiction. My short stories started to get placed in competitions. One of them, “A Home from Home”, won Gold in the Creative Future Writers Awards. The story became the genesis for my debut novel, Northern Boy, which came out in June 2024, after it won a competition run by the publisher Unbound. It’s a coming-of-age tale, set in the early 1980s in a Lancashire mill town, about being a “butterfly among the bricks”.
In 2025, with my writing taking off, I took the decision to become a full-time author, waving goodbye to the security of the City. Sometimes, you just need to take that leap into the dark. Just like when I chose Bangor all those years ago without having attended an Open Day. No regrets, no time to change your mind, just going for it and knowing there will be amazing times and opportunities ahead.
Northern Boy is available from all the usual places, including Unbound, Amazon, Waterstones and bookshop.org. You can also listen to it as an audiobook, at Audible.