A series of fortunate accidents
Mick May OBE (MA 1981) graduated from St Andrews to embark on a career in finance in the City of London for 20 years. He then set up and grew the social enterprise Blue Sky – which has employed approaching 2,000 released prisoners – and was awarded the OBE in 2016 for this work.
Mick recently published ‘Cancer and Pisces’ – the story of his survival with cancer and how his love of fishing contributed to this. Here he describes how writing the book triggered memories of his time at St Andrews.
There is that intriguing game that radio hacks love to play: “What would your younger self think of you today?”. Part of the appeal is the demands it makes of one. Were we sufficiently ambitious to write down our ambitions all those years ago? Do we have the humility to concede we fell far short, or alternatively how would we cope with the smugness of admitting we had outperformed mightily?
It was something that never even occurred to me. Perhaps better that way, for we all tend to ignore Benjamin Franklin’s observation that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”.
I suppose we all recognise the tax part of the truism but prefer to overlook the mortality bit. My entire life I certainly had until one day in May 2013 I was advised I was suffering from a rare and incurable cancer called mesothelioma. Minimal research revealed that it was caused by exposure to asbestos and that the average life expectancy from diagnosis was around ten months.
As in many other features of my life, though, I appear to have been fortunate. The medical dream team, cutting edge treatment, family, faith and friends have combined to keep the grim reaper at bay long beyond 2013 or 2014, raising a few eyebrows along the way. And all these extra weeks and months have come to feel like a bonus – the calendar years amongst the most pleasurable allotted throughout my life.
One day in 2019 as I reflected on this good luck an idea came back to me that had originally been suggested by Jonathan Aitken a couple of years earlier. It was to write a book on my illness and my love of fishing; at the time I had poured on it scorn and more. Now on a balmy Easter Day my views had changed – and ‘Cancer and Pisces’ began to take shape.
Given its subject, the bulk of the book is inevitably centred on the past seven years. But my training as a mediaeval historian came to the fore; it seemed just impossible to write about the present without setting it in the context of the past. I have always been a subscriber to the belief that you’ll never know where you’re going unless you get to grips with where you’ve been. And so my university days inevitably hove into view – a Woosterian expression appropriate to the sunlit memories.
It was never part of my plan to attend St Andrews. That might sound casual and ungracious, especially as I have forever since been grateful that I did go there.
The truth is though that it was my third choice of university. Such was my youthful confidence, bordering on shameful arrogance probably, that it never occurred to me that I would not be successful in being offered a place by my first let alone my second selection. In consequence I was all set on a different career path when a telegram (remember them?) sent in August 1977 alerted me to the still open offer for September of that year. By that time I had matured sufficiently (though still not substantially) to recognise the dramatic opportunity that lay before me.
In a handbrake turn moment I accepted the offer after five minutes of consideration and sent back a telegram of acceptance. Further surprises came my way on arrival at this ancient seat of learning. When asked what I wanted to read I answered “law”. The admissions tutor looked crestfallen and explained with patience, just about obscuring her incredulity at the oaf before her, that St Andrews did not offer that as a course.
“What else do you do?” I enquired.
“Well, the Mediaeval History Faculty is very highly-regarded”, came the reply. Alea jacta est.
In such wayward manner began a period of my life that will always be edged in sepia. I would love to pretend that I was a model student, though that is some way from the reality. A high point might have been the 1978 Kate Kennedy Procession when I featured as Kate. This, however, was offset (mercifully not publicly) a year or so later by several hours spent in the cells of the police station on North Street following an arrest for what I can only describe as a spot of youthful exuberance.
But the spirit and culture of the University quickly and happily came to inhabit my soul. And to inform my life. I wouldn’t pretend that I left any mark as an intellectual thinker on the two History Departments that did their level best to teach me, but they left an indelible impact on me. It took a couple of years after my departure for this to manifest itself most clearly, but from around the mid-1980s onwards a biography or history book has always been on my bedside table – over the decades since I have read hundreds and hundreds.
I also owe to St Andrews my self-reliant spirit. Located many miles from a major city the university asked you to make your own fun, in a way that numerically larger establishments in bigger cities didn’t. We all learnt how to make new friends rather than to rely on pre-existing networks, to seek out communities of people who share broadly the same interests. These turned out to be invaluable assets in taking advantage of foreign postings and the vicissitudes of a corporate life. At a critical juncture of my professional life I had to start a second career; would this have been possible without those four years in Fife?
And to return to the beginning, what might my younger self have made of me now? Given how wealthy some of my contemporaries have made themselves I suspect he would be slightly disenchanted with the current state of my financial affairs. But then again, maybe not. I don’t think any of us had any great expectation of fabulous riches. What we might have prided ourselves on, though, would have been non-conformity and a desire to challenge the way society thinks about things.
And perhaps, just perhaps, in this regard I would not have let my younger self down.
Mick’s memoir ‘Cancer and Pisces’ was published by Quiller in August 2020. The author’s royalties have been donated in their entirety to Cancer Research UK