I was at rock bottom in a grim Dublin when my life was turned around by an elderly stranger |
In the summer of 2008, I was 22 years old, with unwise peroxide-dyed hair, working as an English teacher in Kolkata, when I first read the word “recession” in an email from back home in Ireland. Until then, my biggest concern was worrying that the children I was teaching would inherit my Northern Irish accent as they made their first tentative steps in a new language. I was unaware that soon I was going to meet a teacher of my own who would change how I looked at life.
While my pupils skilfully built confidence in English, I was fixated on that one word – recession. It hadn’t been used once in my four years studying at Trinity College in Dublin.
A Dublin cafe in 2011, not long after Ireland’s economy crashed.Credit: AP
In the 2000s, Ireland’s newfound wealth was hard to avoid. Some students regularly went Christmas shopping in New York, tank-like SUVs jostled for position on narrow streets and cranes dominated Dublin’s skyline. The economic boom had seen Ireland dubbed the Celtic Tiger and it snarled arrogantly. But now the recession had arrived, due to a chronic lack of financial regulation and a property bubble that had spectacularly burst. Delirious optimism displaced by an impenetrable crisis.
From the age of 11, I had been working towards my dream of being a journalist. Through hard work, I had overcome a relative lack of academic ability to get good grades in high school and at university. Everything had been mapped out: I would soon leave Kolkata and start a........