How I got here 2: The wilderness years
The moment I left my comfortable existence as a schoolboy in Newcastle, and set up as a student in London, I knew I’d made the right decision. My parents were almost obsessive in their quest to keep me at home, and tried everything in their power to prevent me from flying the nest. I’d become bewitched by the big city when I’d visited the place in order to be interviewed by my prospective universities. My parents had to come along as well obviously, as I was not to be trusted to stay alive. I did stay alive however, and decided that I was to study Physics at Kings College on the Strand. As it happened, my A-level grades were insufficient for the red-brick establishment. and I was offered places at Chelsea College, Queen Mary College, and Salford University. QMC became my immediate choice because of it’s gritty location in the heart of the East End, surrounded by huge, dangerous estates of tower blocks. Funny how my mind worked.
Life was a blast for a year – a haze of cheap beer, poor diet, and a mounting overdraft. I resided in a small cell in a tower block in the suburb of South Woodford, E18. The block was one of three towers which blighted the area as part of the QMC halls of residence. Long-demolished, they towered over the North Circular A406 where it joined the M11. I spent hours watching the traffic, and often marvelled at the many accidents which played out right before my eyes.
The one thing that didn’t change in me during 83/84 was my ability to capture everything around me with my trusty Nikon EM. It went everywhere, shot everything, and documented my life as per usual. Everything else – personality, experiences, attitudes was turned on it’s head as I discovered a different world. If I’d not left Newcastle, I probably would have turned into a totally different person devoid of the tolerance and experience required to live as an outsider in a big city. My studies were obviously a secondary distraction to living in London, and I was promptly booted out of my course at the end of the first year after failing all the exams apart from the very difficult, abstract stuff about complex maths & relativistic physics. Typical of me. With no discernible future, and some pressing debts, it was time to enter the world of work for the first time.
Now at this point, any normal person would have taken stock of their life, done some thinking, and attempted to secure a photo-assistant job at one of the many commercial studios which covered the creative capital of the world. The early 80’s were the heyday of advertising and fashion photography, and junior jobs were apparently plentiful, glamorous, and devoid of the requirement to work unpaid for 2 years in some internship role. It didn’t even occur to me to go down this route. I simply took the first job I could get – in my case, as a temporary road sweeper with Barnet Council on a month to month contract for £64 a week. This was the first step on the road to the complete destruction of my creative mind over the next 20 years. I moved from this position, to a dealer’s job with a City Stockbroker – a role I had absolutely no idea how to fulfil. This resulted in my resignation after 3 days, and a leap into yet another arbitrary role with the TSB bank, followed by a year working as an ops manager for one of London’s biggest Bureau de Change firms, operated by two Italian brothers who were renowned for busting balls. Mine were well and truly busted after a year, and following a big cock-up involving millions of Italian Lire, I was forced to accept a bailout from my old man to pay back the firm, in return for my migration from the capital back home. I left with a heavy heart in June 1988 after a 5 year spell living in the greatest city in the world. I had nothing but my clothes, some records, and a fridge.
Eurochange: how to destroy your life in one year.
Back in Newcastle, I followed the same pattern of working in arbitrary jobs – namely as a foreign exchange consultant in the Thomas Cook Group, followed by a ten year stint as a manager in a sub-prime retail finance firm. The former position did allow me to experience travel to some very nice places – Australia, South East Asia, North Africa, all over the US, and parts of western Europe.
My life consisted of stressful, mind numbing work, interspersed with bouts of heavy binge drinking. I did meet, move in with, and eventually marry the love of my life, Tina however, so I had a force of nature to keep me from moving in the wrong direction.
After a trip to Thailand in the late 90’s during which she was in constant abdominal pain, Tina was taken seriously ill one saturday evening, rushed into hospital. Surgeons discovered a huge mass which was removed along with an ovary, and the news that we would probably be childless from that point on. The subsequent few years of failed IVF, work dissatisfaction, and financial pressures made us re-evaluate the important things in life, and we decided to take a leap of faith together in order to start new lives away from the ridiculous pursuit of money and status that we’d inadvertently stumbled upon along the way, and try and follow our true callings. Join me for the next thrilling episode soon!
