Flashback fifteen years or so and you would find me laughing with my family, frying fish by the riverside. Moving from the Jamaican countryside to inner-city London was a time I could probably write a novel about, but moving from London to Cambridge, a decade later, was an equally defining experience in my life.
It may seem ridiculous, but before Cambridge, I had not really thought about the fact that I was a working-class, black woman. I was Jamaican, my best friends were Chinese and Pakistani and Zimbabwean and Ethiopian, but in Cambridge, our differences paled to insignificance when we stood alongside the white, middle-class majority.
I quickly realised that being a working-class, black woman meant something. I initially felt the need to disguise my ignorance of this new world but it was quickly exhausting. I got tired of feigning laughter at cheese jokes (no, I’d never heard of Camembert)…