Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Heidi Colthup who works in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Kent. We learn about the unusual criteria she uses to remember how long she has been here and we discover that Heidi has also worked as a freelance journalist and trained as a primary school teacher. Heidi talks about why she felt powerless in that profession apart from when she was actually teaching and we learn why all of her careers have been creative and why she is an ‘intellectual butterfly’. Heidi was married to a farmer and has twin boys and we find out how she combined fine art with driving tractors and how she ended up channelling her talents through writing. We learn why books have always been a sanctuary for Heidi and why the reader gets to lead a thousand lives, and we have an extended discussion around trashy novels and ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and the notion of ‘counterpoint’. Heidi talks about being a child of the 1970s with Scottish ancestry and we learn about how and wh