As falls from grace go, spending your 38th birthday packing boxes in an Amazon warehouse is pretty high up there. If that sounds terribly snobbish or ungrateful, forgive me. Let’s put it down to being peddled the Thatcherite dream at the home counties girls’ school I attended in the 90s: if I worked hard enough, the message was, I could do anything.
My parents, who arrived in the UK from Grenada in the 1960s, did a pretty good job of making me into the right kind of immigrant. I did well at school, attended great universities (undergrad and postgrad) and was writing for national papers by my late teens. I truly believed the idea that, as a black person, if I just worked twice as hard as my white colleagues, as the old adage goes, success could be mine.
