The pop singer has announced plans to take a mid-career break and study English literature. As I found out, there’s no better time to do it
For more than two decades, I lived untroubled by the quiet disappointment of my parents, who had assumed I would one day go to university. But I didn’t. Getting a degree was never an ambition, and I didn’t need letters after my name to prove an intellectual point. I had Countdown for that.
But then, while working in Afghanistan, everything changed. In keeping with the fashion of the time in conflict zones around the globe, I blamed the UN.
