Three years ago, having passed the audition to play myself, I sat in a sweltering recording studio with a Very Nice Middle Class sound technician recording the audiobook for Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns. Around two and a half days into hearing me talk about every brutality growing up in poverty had visited upon me, he interrupted me mid-sentence and shouted loudly over the recording, “But what can I do? What can I possibly do?”
We stopped recording. He explained to me that he didn’t have a lot of spare money and barely any time himself. Only then did I realise he had spent those days feeling I was personally targeting him for society’s ills.
