New Blood Art: The Story - Part 3
Cambridge, 1997 - 1998
After India, I didn’t want to go back - I wanted to go forward. Somewhere new. To cross into a new space. Cambridge offered that - a place at Homerton College - a postgraduate year in art education. On my first day, I met another Sarah. We ended up sharing the year - our names, our rooms, our clothes and our weekends.
“Sarah…?” “Yes, Sarah?”
We seemed to give each other permission to be silly and shared a kind of lightness that made the rest possible. There was a quiet sense of being in it together. I had needed that - it was the perfect antidote to the year before. Teacher training is a world of its own. One moment you’re writing about educational theory, the next you’re trying to motivate a room full of teenagers who are five minutes younger than you and twice as confident.
As an artist, it was a new kind of performance - managing energy, leading a space, staying soft while trying to keep some order. And the art room? Endless possibility. Endless mess. A space for brilliance, rebellion, and the occasional sculpture you hoped no one in senior leadership would notice. We learned the rhythm of that full-on year together - hold it in, let it out. Repeat. Staying afloat sometimes meant saying “Erm, excuse me Year 9s!” forty times a day - trying to maintain some version of authority while secretly wondering if you were pleading for help.. We kept the lightness alive wherever we could.
Like at the salsa class. We arrived hopeful, but the room was mostly men with unusual footwork and intense eye contact, so we did the only sensible thing and partnered with each other. By the time we made it to Pizza Express we were a little overwrought - sweaty, adrenalised, trying to behave… We were seated at one of those tiny marble tables, with a paper menu that looked sturdier than it was.
We ordered two large glasses of red wine and a Veneziana. When Sarah set her glass down, she didn’t realise the menu was hanging off the edge. The weight tipped, the menu flipped, and she caught it - in one of those beautifully fast, reflexive sportswoman moves - but by then the wine had already become a red arc in the air. It landed, quite precisely, on a woman in a white suit at the next table.
Sarah immediately went into dry-cleaning mode - polite, mortified, willing to pay for everything. We wanted to leave, of course we did, but that would’ve been too rude. We’d already ruined her suit. We ate most of our pizza and didn’t look at each other for the rest of the meal. It was almost unbearable. We left, nodding our apologies, whilst edging backwards toward the door.
