Strange Things Happen At Bus Stops.

Strange things happen at bus stops. It only took a few minutes of musing in the drizzling rain the other day to realise what I’ve been missing from my life since I started university. I was standing on the Strand, watching a myriad of fashionistas materialize in time-honoured kaleidoscopically colourful style for London Fashion Week.

I was always a difficult child. I can vividly recall my beleaguered mother driving me an hour every day to nursery, whereupon arrival I would put up a spectacular display of histrionics. Once, I was sick all over some power-crazed supervisor’s lap after being forced to watch Pingu. Mum said she would never forget the day when the nursery teacher fatalistically predicted that I would “never ever settle in at school”.

In fact, all I really wanted was to sit at home watching my mum create her bespoke wedding dresses. I was her right-hand girl; and I used to smuggle little scraps of silk and cuttings from the liberty print bolts into my sewing box, so I could whip up my own designs later on.

Then I started school. Of course, good academic grades and school awards were just further embarrassing confirmation to my siblings of my eccentricity. I was playfully branded as the “black sheep” in the midst of an artistic family; not to say that I relinquished my arts subjects. I’ve always found that art perfectly counteracts essays.

By the time A-levels dawned upon me bearing their academic burden, I can categorically say that I owe my sanity to Product Design which allowed me proliferate my creativity. I felt like I was betraying Mum, and myself in a way when I decided not to pursue art. I remember in one university interview when the professor boorishly questioned the correlation between my A-levels. I replied simply that creativity is manifested in numerous ways. Recently, however I’d lost sight of pursuing those avenues.

I believe everyone has some degree of creativity. And those who staunchly deny it just haven’t discovered it yet. If we stop classifying our talents and start embracing new mediums of self-expression then it can only be a positive thing. I look at the “anything goes” fashion on the streets as a telling form of reinvention; and London is the ideal habitat to nurture that instinct.  As for me, I realised I didn’t have to give up art. In fact, nothing catalyses the desire to eschew books and channel the urge to deface your insipid, yellow bedroom wall with a wacky mural like embarking on an English degree.

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