Life on the other side.

Seems a million years since I last put any thoughts on here. Sometimes there were just too many thoughts

Four and a half years went by so quickly.

I sit here in Wellington, half a world away from Aberystwyth and reflect on the last 4 and a half years. I blame Facebook. It was through contacts on Facebook that studying in the UK became possible.  My future supervisor put up a photo of himself with a clutch of Doctor Who actors. I commented 'wish you were my supervisor' and Matt responded with 'well why don't you apply then?' He walked me through the application, the plan and the bid for the scholarship that I was awarded.

Early September 2013 I arrived in the UK. My luggage didn't. My first port of call was the Walking in Eternity conference hosted at the University of Hertfordshire and Kim Akass, where I met a lot of the academics that share an interest in investigating Doctor Who, especially as 2013 was the fiftieth anniversary of the television programme. So while I did not have any clothes, nor did I have to struggle with a huge suitcase across London to Hertfordshire. They couriered it to my temporary digs, seemingly untouched by time and space.

I should make clear however that my studies were not on Doctor Who per se. In fact I found myself working in a cross disciplinary study which certainly centered Doctor Who as an object of study, but was very much more interested in the theory and tradition of these actors who have played The Doctor and what techniques they might use to give  a varied but consistent performance by twelve actors over fifty years. I shall return to this.

Arriving in Aberystwyth with no real experience of Cymru/Wales was fascinating for this old man from Aotearoa/New Zealand. Like home, signs were bilingual. Like home, it could be cold or warm at nature's whim.  As I drove into Wales through Hay-on-Wye with my best friend, Phillip, and his family, I began to appreciate that, in a sense, I was both Home and Away. Very quickly I thought I needed to capitalise on the differences and the similarities. I must have succeeded since I now think of both Aberystwyth and Wellington as Home and Away.

My department was Theatre, Film and Television Studies, which proved to be a hop, a skip and a jump from my student accommodation. I would stay there for three years. Luckily for me it was a similar distance to the Arts Centre. Both of these places became significant and meaningful refuges from the difficult path to the PhD. The department was also a place where interdisplinary studies were encouraged and nurtured, and my study bears the evidence of talking and working alongside academics and practitioners that make up this extraordinary environment.

All is not rosy in life sometimes however, and as much as other components of the university were supportive, particularly the folk in the International Office and the Postgraduate School, it wasn't long before some issues arose which questioned whether the University itself was still committed to it's core business of research and teaching. No amount of car parks or student accommodation, or tropical campuses, can justify taking money away from its core reason for existing. It was a pity, because it was clear at the onset that a university set up upon the labour of Miners should have little tolerance for the extremes of the cargo cult of management and 'business' and neoliberalism.

My first effort, after beginning to aclimatise to my workload was to explore the Aberystwyth Arts Centre. As part of the university it offers a potent point of impact upon the local community and visitors that come to Aberystwyth on holiday. It was there that I found a way to give back something, by becoming a volunteer usher for both the cinema and for the live venues. Though I must admit that this work also benefited me in giving me access to a wider variety of theatrical experiences than my limited budget would have allowed. I still feel in the debt of Auriel and her crew. As well as making friends among the ushers at the theatre, the studio and the great hall I made good friends among my first love, screen. Gaz and Nia and the ushers I worked with at the cinema provided me with a haven so many times when times were tough, with Nia being able to relate and commiserate over each postgraduate hurtle with the knowledge of an insider.  In the last months of my stay in Aber it was there I missed the most.

Postgraduate work generates both demands and freedoms. You are mostly responsible to yourself with timely interventions from your supervisor to gently prod you in certain directions and to encourage your efforts while you form the ability to make these discretions yourself. The goal is to know for yourself when the works stands on its own feet. This is a crucial difference between it and undergraduate work where you are led to material and encouraged to engage critically with it. It is also where I became lost, in the depth of material, in the theory and in the philosophy. I was reading work on film, on television, on acting, on stardom, on labour, on nursing and professional knowledge. I met Foucault, Ricouer, Plato and Aristotle, Freud and Jung, Ellis, Hills, Tulloch, Hyde, Roach, Limon and Thomson. I followed the theories of these writers through mimesis, hermeneutics, phenomenonology, spectrality, mythology, alchemy, screen history and studies, charisma and charm, theatre technique from Stanislavski on, and the use of archetypes such as the Trickster: the clown, the fool and the knave as component parts. In the end I believe I covered over 500 sources.

Thus it wasn't difficult getting lost and it took me time to find my way through. In this I depended not only on the staff of TFTS but also on my fellow journeymen, denizens of the departmental postgraduate office. Their journeys, while different from my own, often faced similar challenges. Mind you there was little excuse for getting lost as, being an international student, each month the Home Office, all at a cost to the university, required me to report to the TFTS office to sign in that I was still in Aberystwyth. Each month I also had to submit a report on a meeting between my supervisor, and myself, which made sense early on but as I became more and more independent became more of a burden. Every six months a census would be called where we would present our passport, our visa and ourselves for inspection. At least I didn't have to also report to the Police every month.

 

As a commonwealth citizen I found myself in the situation of being eligible to vote in the United Kingdom. I am not sure my vote accounted for much as little changed over my time in Wales. However when it came to the Brexit vote the irony of my ability to record my opinion, when the person in the desk next to me could not became glaringly obvious. That EU citizens were disempowered from deciding their future seemed very rude to me, so I aligned my vote with their opinion. Still didn't make a difference. 

Within the confines of my department, my office, progress was made. My first supervisor, Prof. Matt Hills, being headhunted to another university meant that my supervision team changed and to some extent the direction of my research. I began concentrating on the actors themselves, upon whom they were and what they did to create their character. I gave a paper at Reading University. I met Christopher Eccleston but as with the others no interviews materialised. I began constructing an argument without them based on published interview material. However, these setbacks did take a toll.

Often we take our health for granted. This is very true of postgraduate students who can often feel like an imposter doing this work, and then run themselves into quite serious states of exhaustion and ill health. Here the third landmark for Aberystwyth begins to enter my story  - Bronglais Hospital. For me it began with blood in strange places, with feelings of inadequacy, ennui, with an ambulance ride to hospital with a lack of movement and response on my left side, with a fall caused by difficulties breathing and consequently a severe rap as my head hit the pavement (my second ride in an ambulance) and in the subsequent week a growing inability to draw breath. Thankfully this last happened two weeks after I had handed in my thesis, and I had begun to plan for the viva examination and my travel home to New Zealand. Throughout this time my GP had been very understanding and helpful, except, sadly, that final problem. 

One of the saddest observations about the UK and it’s marvelous National Health, chronicled in Ken Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake, was the way that primary care has been run down, to the point that when you ring the surgery triage is handled by the person answering the phone. If, like me, you don’t want to make a fuss and undersell your symptoms then the receptionist will defer you to a phone call back by the doctor, but without indicating when this might be. Through this it took three days before I saw a Doctor. By that stage my system was very close to collapse and I was no longer even capable of walking from waiting room to examination room without nearly passing out and falling from lack of breath. One look was all it took for the Doctor to order me to go to the hospital.

In fact I had succumbed to a double pulmonary emboli- a clot in each lung, which could conceivably have ended my life. I was lucky it seems. Once I was at the hospital the care I received was exemplary. While not everything went to plan I found myself being treated with respect, I was kept informed of what was going on and felt cared for, despite the way in which the system has been severely mishandled by a succession of neoliberal governments from both right and left.

I was in hospital for seven days and I am still undergoing investigations and management of the condition, which affected not only my health but also my plans to fly home. I needed to rest for some months and continued to have contact with the specialist Dr Hatache who oversaw my recovery. The University proved very supportive as well, allowing me an extension that I only partially used. The Department in particular was very helpful, through both my supervisors Professor David Ian Rabey and Dr Jamie Medhurst and the support of our marvelous PhD coordinator Dr Kate Egan. After Christmas with my friend’s family, I returned to Aberystwyth ready to face the viva. Through Kate’s support and my examiners’ rigorous engagement my viva became one of the best days I have ever experienced, with much constructive criticism aimed at making my work better.

So what do I take from Aberystwyth, what enduring memories of my time in the UK will travel with me? That doing a PhD is hard, one of the greatest challenges of my life. That friends and support become so important during these hard times, especially if you are far from home. That completion can feel triumphant. But also I carry memories of the Prom in summer, the arts centre and all I befriended there, the professionalism of the people directly delivering National Health, the collegially of my department so badly affected by the decisions of those committed to creative destruction and productivity. I remember five weeks of Abertoir, and the Panto, and the summer shows, I remember the Halloween train by the enthusiasts of the Vale of Rheidol Railway. I remember Hinterland/y gwyll. I remember the Commodore; I remember the gravel covering the seafront and how the starlings still flew and the sun still set behind the Pier. I remember the many wonderful people who filled my time in Aberystwyth with such joy. Mauruuru koe katoa/ Thank you all.