185: Matt Harrington

My guest this week is Matt Harrington who studied English at Lampeter from 1991-94. There are many great undergraduate reminisces here, beginning with a recollection of the circumstances around our graduation in July 1994. Matt worked in a bookshop post-Lampeter and then as a junior copywriter, and he talks about how this enabled him to write with economy, and how that played out in his student days when it came to submitting essays. Matt reveals how he managed to avoid reading lots of Victorian novels, and why he gelled with his peers because we were all arts and humanities students (there is a fascinating thread about Informatics being an outlier). We reflect on how a city university wouldn’t have been right for us and we refer to a contemporary of ours, Alexis Athena De Winter, and the way Lampeter was a very accepting environment. Matt talks about being born in London but made in Lampeter, and we discuss the transgressive nature of Lampeter. We talk about the skills developed from our time in university, with some people having gone into politics, and we reflect on what our children today would make of the world we once inhabited in a town without a railway station or cinema. Matt was born in London and then moved to Kent at the age of three, and we talk about how so many students were from the Home Counties. He also refers to having transported Lampeter to London after he left. We discuss our musical memories and Matt remembers listening to Atlantic 252 back in his student days, and we find out which was the only song he would play on the upstairs Union jukebox where they never changed the discs. Then, at the end of the interview, we remember the 1992 General Election, which took place in the April of our first year, and Matt reveals why he is a chronic nostalgic.