Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Mary Sullivan who undertook a long journey towards doing a degree in History and Religious Studies at the University of Kent, having previously worked as a psychiatric nurse and a social worker. We talk about her previous experience of going to Ruskin College, Oxford which specialized in offering education for working class people, and about how the two sides of her degree blended so well. We discuss the advantages of studying Religious Studies, including finding out about faiths different to one’s own and I ask Mary whether her own perception of herself changed during the course of her degree. Mary shares her earliest memory, from the time she was in her cot, and she discusses her family’s Irish roots. She has since reacquainted with an old childhood friend from Tunbridge Wells. We talk about the notion of ‘stranger danger’ involving children and how we negotiate the past as well as ‘fitting in’ at school, detention, and issues around behaviour and the change in culture over the d