It is a Sunday morning and I am writing this at home. The last day of a hot summer is gorgeously golden in the garden. It is peaceful, and I am in the mood for sociology. Sociology never leaves you; it is your choice if you leave it. Leaving it is sometimes helpful and even necessary. The return, with new eyes, can be a joyful thing. It can also be unsettling and challenging: from those moments of new engagements have come my own ‘personal bests’. The first thing to say is that I have laboured under the belief that I was leaving sociology several times in my life and have insecure identity questions about being a sociologist at all. Like all identities it sits within and between social locations and is the site of games and negotiations. What is a real, proper, sociologist? What is sociology?

Coming across sociology in the first place seemed to me for many years to be accidental. Accident has become part of the pattern and is a custom of the (my) country. I would like to be able to say that I have always been socially generous and got involved hoping sociology to be a force for democratic good and essential to our social understanding. I own that I have also been self-interested and got into it in part because it was an industry which was recruiting. In any event, I view sociology as a road map to a different place. Sociologists might say that this individual experience is most likely a social pattern, and that the challenges are wrestled down by agency and structure. Since the individual biography is a kind of window on the world, here is my version.

I went to a girls’ school in the first year after its conversion to grammar school status. In the late 1970s it held no truck with such a new-fangled craze as the social sciences at A-level, not that this was particularly relevant given that my class of 34 and my year group of 100 largely fled to work, motherhood or nothing in particular at the earliest possible school leaving age. My own transition was to a job in a bank, my cohort of leavers left in our wake a small group of hardy souls a few of whom would make it later to polytechnics and universities.