Twelve years ago I walked into the extremely fancy lobby of Kings Cross St Pancras Hotel, a place I’d never been inside, would never have dared to, though at the time I’d lived in London for over a decade.
I’d taken the morning off from my project manager job working at a children’s charity for this appointment specially and the stakes felt incredibly high. I was electric with anxiety. I’d picked my outfit carefully for the day, a £10 shirt from TK Maxx and black skinny jeans (I was a charity worker and therefore perpetually skint). On the grand steps I took a deep breath and walked into my very first press interview for my slightly-ridiculously-titled, debut novel, Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, a book that would change my life.
The interview was for The Herald and with the Herald’s very own Rosemary Goring. For me, it represented a huge milestone. A young woman who grew up on some of Scotland’s worst schemes, who left school at 15 with no qualifications, who was told implicitly that she, her stories, did not matter, was now getting a platform in Scotland's premier paper, the longest-running national newspaper in the world.
I do not remember much of the interview; it passed in a fever dream of trying not to say something daft. It is a great read, though I think this is mostly thanks to Rosemary’s skill as a writer, curating my nervous burble into something resembling a shape. I remember that Rosemary was unstintingly kind, right up........