Epea Pteroenta

What if I’d taken the other fork in the road?
Edinburgh’s Royal Mile during the Festival Fringe

I never understood why ‘the one who got away’ is implicitly understood to mean a person, and one of erstwhile romantic interest to boot. Do people, as a matter of course, log their conquests? More importantly, do people, as a matter of course, meet with rejection only once in their, hemhem, careers? If either of them is true (or, worse, both), then both my circle of friends and I have been a really sorry lot. But I digress.

To my mind, the only thing that can well and truly get away from one is an opportunity. It’s the one thing, that combination of time, place, and situation, that is entirely irreplaceable. The place and situation can be duplicated, but time waits for no one, and the person who comes across the same thing a year later is no longer the same person. The chance is well and truly gone.

In the summer of 1995, just before graduating university, I did a two-week stint of summer school in Lancaster University. Its English department is twinned with the respective department of Athens University, and the trip was an annual event. 1995 was its 17th year, and for all I know, the tradition remains unbroken.

It was my first time away from home, since I had missed the big five-day trip that marks the end of high school and I had never afforded to go on holiday without family since. Being unsupervised abroad was an intoxicating experience; the fact that we stayed on campus, way out of town and with few opportunities to be reckless, did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm.

I remember very little of the lectures; I blame it on the windowless amphitheatre and the growing sleep deprivation caused by the brief English summer nights. What I do remember is the places I went to and the things I did there. Wandering about Chester High Street, the quaintest I’ve seen, even with my current exposure. Promenading atop the Conwy Castle walls. Seeing Julius Caesar in Stratford, with Hugh Quarshie as Marcus Antonius. Sailing over Lake Windermere on a steamboat and enjoying high tea at the Old Dungeon Ghyll in Grasmere.

The opportunity I let fly through my fingers came during a day trip in Edinburgh. I had been very keen to see a bit of Scotland, and I wasn’t disappointed. Edinburgh is very much my kind of city; I thought, sitting on top of the city tour bus, that I could easily live there, if I got fed up with Athens, tiny as it is by comparison.

The shops I’m most likely to raid, whenever I am, are bookstores, and with my interest in languages, I’d naturally gravitate to some Gaelic resources. And there it was, on the door of a multi-lingual bookstore on the Royal Mile, an advertisment for ‘staff wanted’. At that moment, there was nothing I wanted more in the world than to walk in, get the job (with my four languages, I had no doubt I would), and stay there for good.

What stopped me? The fact that I had one more exam to take in order to get my degree. If I didn’t, six years of work would go down the drain. I’m ashamed to admit it, but leaving my mother alone weighed less with me as a deterrent than dropping out of university while the end was so close.

So back I went, convinced that I’d never be given such a chance again. I took the exam, and the hoops that our amateurish professor made us jump through is ranting matter in itself. I got my degree and continued in a sort of half-life of poverty, tedium, and growing frustration for another 12 years…

Of course I did get to move to the UK eventually, though Edinburgh is still far away and I’m nowhere near using my linguistic skills as much. But that’s a story for another entry.