Around 15 years ago, during my final year at medical school at King’s, I applied for my junior doctor foundation training placement. I wanted to be in the north of London, one of the most competitive deaneries in the country. I didn’t get it – and was allocated to the Black Country instead. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that the first thing I did was Google: “Where is the Black Country?”
I never wanted to be in Stoke-on-Trent. It was somewhere I didn’t know and had never even visited, hundreds of miles from home and everything I cared about; on top of that, my Mum was terminally ill, and so being up in the Midlands – hours away – was far less than ideal.
And yet – in the way that life is, that 12 months turned out to be an indescribably better experience than what I’d been expecting/dreading. People were kind and welcoming, I made some good friends (at a time when I really needed some), and it was possibly the most sociable year of my life.
In early August 2010, 2 days before I started my very first job, my old school friends Vicky Huang and Anthony Waller (who were, sadly for me, both about to leave Stoke) treated me out for dinner at a local restaurant called The Swan With Two Necks. Somehow, that evening gave me the sense that everything was going to work out just fine.
Whenever I’m back in the area I still try and visit The Swan With Two Necks, and earlier I happily got to take my son Sam for the first time. So much has happened in my life since that dinner in 2010 – and yet today it curiously felt like barely any time had passed at all.
Ramy’s World 