The Teeming Mass

During the summer after finishing my A Levels in 2020, I wrote a language and linguistics column for an online magazine known as The Teeming Mass.

The following posts, all tagged with The Teeming Mass, are versions of the pieces I submitted to the magazine and cover a variety of topics including accents, Jeremy Corbyn, and podcasts.

Edited by Molly Innes, the purpose of the magazine was to amplify marginalised voices and discuss social inequality. The name comes from a Jeanette Winterson quote:

"I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class... I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape -- but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community -- to society?"

As I was in my final year of A Levels, my exams were cancelled and I was not set any more work from ~March 2020.

Overnight, I went from a full-time student part-time carer to a full-time carer. This was something I really struggled with, and actually leaving my hometown and moving to Sheffield felt extremely far away.

Writing this column gave me a sense of purpose in a time where I felt very disconnected from my student-self.

While the site that these columns were published on is no longer active, I wanted to post them because they were the first 'proper published writing' I did and at the time were something I was immensely proud of.