St Helens: an up and coming town.

'It's grim oop North...'

So who am I? My name's Una McCormack, I'm 29 years old, and I live in the gorgeous University town of Cambridge (England, not Massachusetts). I was brought up in St Helens, Merseyside: a town of little note apart from being the home town of conductor Sir Thomas Beecham and 80s pop idol Rick Astley, and the local health authority which spends the most on Viagra. Oh yeah, and there's a rugby team and they used to make glass there, but not since the general collapse of the British manufacturing base. The St Helens Metropolitan Borough website is a triumph of spin: notice how the nice places mentioned are all near St Helens, and not in St Helens... Despite it being a town of no real interest, those who have escaped St Helens remain bizarrely attached to it. It is also the urban equivalent of the 'Seven Degrees to Kevin Bacon' game. You are unlikely to be as many as 7 degrees from somone who has lived in St Helens.

I am from a HUGE family - well, there are six of us, but that's pretty big. Only one sibling has a presence, so if you get bored of this McCormack, go and see Niall instead. Niall is interesting. He lives in New Zealand and speaks Chinese. He also devotes most of his page to St Helens.

Newnham: BAs in Knitting.

'You're History!'
'You're Social and Political Science!'

Back to me. Eighteen years of Tory rule were as nothing compared to the 18 years of my youth trapped in a grim Northern town. Battling against all the odds arising from a purely middle-class background, I sat four A-levels, and in 1990 went up to Newnham College , Cambridge, to study History. Part way through I switched to Social and Political Science , and achieved an astonishing 2:1, like everyone else.

Caius: A scientist's college. Their atomic clock is the world leader.

'How do you know if someone went to Cambridge?'
'They just told you.'

Newnham College is the older of the two remaining female undergraduate colleges at the University of Cambridge. The older colleges round here are a bit snooty about Newnham, but that's just the last gasp of patriarchy in the face of female domination and about time too. Don't pay any attention to them. Newnham is very pretty and has lots of nice flowers. Whilst at college I met my partner Matthew, who was a student at Gonville and Caius College, and who I enjoy describing as the brainiest person in the world. Here's what Matthew looks like.

The Judge: Welcome to Toytown.

'Kindergarten, school, university - BLACK HOLE.'

Since stopping being a student (and let's face it, it's over then) I have done lots of things. These include: working for possibly the worst company in the world ; taking a Master's degree in Research Methods in Psychology; wangling a job back at the University at the The Judge Institute of Management Studies. I even moved town briefly, whilst studying at the University of Reading, but that didn't last long. The good news is that real life has started once more. As of October 1999, I began a PhD at the Sociology Department at the University of Surrey. This is a picture of me. If you want to know more about what really interests me...