Chapter One - Wrong from the Start

The Early Years

The early years

I was born Adya Sanjaya Ramamurthy on the 29^th September 1967. There are a couple of interesting things about that previous sentence.

1. My birthday is exactly nine months after New Year’s Day and I am surprised that it is not the most common birth date globally, which is 20 days earlier. Clearly my parents had a quiet New Year’s Eve and thought that they could make up for any of their excesses of the 9^th December 1966.

2. I was never called Adya Sanjaya Ramamurthy by anybody, ever, apart from in an official situation like, for example, waiting for a flight. This happened to me once when was 17, ‘would a Adya Sanjaya Ramamurthy’ please come to the Monarch Airways desk please,’ I realised that was me after a few minutes and even then had to make a decision as to whether to go and find out what they possibly want at the expense of my mates’ derision. You see everyone knew me as Sanjay Murthy. Even my parents, sister, family, school, everyone. So at 18, I changed my name to Sanjay Adya Murthy and have been this ever since.

I was born in the King George V Hospital in Ilford, Essex or east London if I am trying to be hard. I don’t think that it is there anymore, but that is where I popped out to greet a world, well England, still basking in the glory of the 1966 FIFA World Cup win. My parents were first generation immigrants to the UK and came over straight from Bangalore (Bengaluru) in 1965 to give themselves and their to-be family a better life. Not that they would have had a bad life back in India as my mum’s family were quite well off and my dad’s side are a resourceful lot. But with romance in his heart and a hastily arranged passport with a false date of birth, my dad and then my mum came over to live in Ealing in west London and then a move across the city to Goodmayes, which you can find at the end of the Elizabeth Line.

We then moved to a maisonette in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, where my sister was born in August 1972 – precisely 15^th August 1972, which is also my parents’ wedding anniversary and India’s Independence Day. Celebrations would have been rife in Hitchin that day. I don’t remember much about those days, apart from the fact that the little brown boy with a bowl cut, home-knitted tank top and dodgy shorts was a serial cat thief. Apparently, I used to round up the local cats and loosely put bits of string round their necks and take them home. I wasn’t allowed pets. No cats were harmed in the making of this story. My dad worked in Letchworth, which is also in Hertfordshire, and was well regarded by the family who owned the electronics firm that he was an engineer at. In around 1974, we left Hitchin and moved to St. Neots in Cambridgeshire where we lived until leaving for India in 1976. It seemed like longer, but St. Neots was, and maybe still is, a great place and in fact we lived there twice, again in 1979-1984.

I am not sure if it is a south Indian thing or whether it was an accident, I suspect the former, as we never lived in a town that had a large immigrant population. I think that this influenced me and pretty much all my friends, then and now are, white and British. Norman Tebbit would have been proud of me. There was Raj Patel and his family in St. Neots but they were the only ones. I had a great time the first time around, had some mates on my street and spent many a happy day scrumping for apples and playing in the fields behind our houses. School was the local junior and I probably spent my days colouring, writing and reading.

Pune, India

Definitely reading and writing, for this plays a part in my subsequent downfall at The Bishop’s School, Pune, India. In the summer of 1976, we packed up and got on a flight to India as my parents had decided that it was time for them to move the family to India. My dad had been offered a job by an Indian company who had somehow heard, in this pre-internet era, of his engineering prowess in a sleepy backwater of central England. To this day, Dancing Queen, that anthemic classic by Swedish popsters Abba, reminds me of Terminal 3 of London’s Heathrow Airport where the nine-year-old me thought that he would never see St. Neots and his mates again. This wasn’t the first time we had boarded a flight to India, the first time was in 1973 when my sister and I went with our mum to visit family for the first time. This was the only time I met my maternal grandfather.

Anyway, we landed at night in Bombay (Mumbai) and I remember the slums on the runway and thinking what we had left behind. We were moving to Pune, a city about 100 miles way and had rented a modern apartment in Salisbury Court, a posh complex away from the hustle and bustle of the city. A series of pink tower blocks surrounded an oval green with a road-cum-running track. We spent the evenings playing cricket in this piece of greenery and running laps around the track. All good so far.

Then there was The Bishop’s School, one of the oldest and most prestigious educational institutes in India. Established in 1864, during the days of the Raj, the school was founded to educate the children of British officers stationed in India. Its colonial heritage was underpinned by the Anglican church and together they created merry hell for me and countless others.

My parents had chosen The BS as the arena for the next stage of my education for a couple of reasons. Firstly it was an English-speaking school and secondly one of my cousins went to its equivalent in Bangalore. I am not sure if anyone had visited The BS or Pune before making this decision, I assume the two factors quoted above were sufficient for me to don my uniform and make my way for 18 months or so, on the back of the maid’s son’s pedal bike, to school. Those journeys are set in my memory as I have a scar on my left heel where I caught it in the spokes of his bike. What didn’t strike me then was that he was probably only 14/15 at the time. Anyway, I safely reached school every day to be met with the intense dislike of the teaching staff and especially a vicious fucker called Mr. Fletcher. Their dislike was partly built on retaining the colonial legacy of teaching the great unwashed, but also on the fact that I looked like I came from Pune but sounded like I came from St. Neots. So when he pulled out books that I had read as a five-year-old, my natural instinct to be a cocky little shit kicked in. Mr Fletcher didn’t like this and in 1976 Pune, corporal punishment was the go to methodology of control. There are three over-riding memories I have of The BS and these are as follows:

1. There was a dead rat somewhere in our classroom and if you have ever smelled a decaying corpse in 40 degrees of heat then you will instantly recognise the sweet smell of death.

2. Being caned, hit by both a cricket bat and table tennis bat by Fletcher and others

3. Being made to stand in the corner of an outdoor boxing ring, in the blazing heat, for hours on end until I fainted, and my dad was called to collect me.

He is most likely dead now, but I would like to meet Fletcher today.

My experiences at The BS played a major part in our return to the UK in 1978. Oh and that my dad’s employers turned out to be complete sheisters and he wasn’t getting paid. My mum, as you will see throughout this book, is a complex character who longed for a return to the romantic ideal of her childhood in Bangalore. If we had moved from St. Neots to Bangalore, I have no doubt that we would have stayed as she would have been surrounded by her massive family and their relative wealth. I would have been called HR Sanjay, for the tradition in south India is to use the first name prefixed by the initials of your ancestral home and father’s first name and no, it’s not the same as what your porn star name would be if you took the name of your first pet and mother’s maiden name. She hated Pune and, in fact, I don’t really remember her being present during that period, so I imagine that it was a bit of blessing that we came back to the UK where she had some friends.

Back to the UK

So sometime in the Spring of 1978 the four of us ended up staying with friends in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, then a quaint little, historical seaside town on the outskirts of Southend-on-Sea. These friends, who were probably the shortest people I have ever met, were also some of the finest. They had one daughter who looked after me when I was a child and, whilst we have lost touch now, I still remember her fondly. I don’t think that I went to school for the months that we lived there, I guess my parents weren’t planning on staying there and so there was little point enrolling me anywhere. My dad got his old job back in Letchworth and we trooped back to middle England, specifically a village called Potton, Bedfordshire, where we lived in a Victorian cottage with no central heating. It was fucking freezing as the only source of heat was a coal fire in the lounge that my dad had to build and light every day.

I enrolled at what was called Mr. Anthony’s Middle School in Potton, I think it was called Burgoyne Middle School officially, and it was a 15-minute walk from the freezing cottage. My sister had it easier as we lived at the end of a terraced row and the junior school was next door, so she just hopped over the dividing wall and landed in the playground. My school and general life in Potton was spent playing football and cricket with mates at The Wreck and seeing if the disposed black sacks by the railway cutting contained any illicit reading materials. Potton was also my first exposure to meat, as my parents are vegetarians, and all meals were strictly veggie. But my mum, in her wisdom, decided that my sister and I had to learn to eat meat as otherwise we would find it difficult. My dad tried to adapt too but found that eating 1970s pork sausages offended his delicate rice-based digestive system. So she would make me a hot breakfast every morning made up of breakfast sausages, a McDonald’s type of breakfast patty with marginally less meat content. She probably went to throw up afterwards for she hated cooking meat and soon stopped, but my carnivorous appetite was free.

Back to St. Neots

It came as no surprise that in the summer of 1979 we moved back to St. Neots, where we stayed until 1984 – an unprecedented period of time given the number of moves I had endured up to this point. It is the only time that I had lived in the same place twice and to this day I don’t like returning to familiarity. But I loved my time there, some of my mates from the previous stint had moved on, but I quickly made new ones and spent many a day blissfully playing out in the park, fields, building sites. A neighbouring lad of my age and I would spend the entire summer, or it certainly felt like it, replicating the English test match cricket summer. We would dress up in our whites and set up stumps on a small patch of ground between our houses and play out 5 days of cricket over 5 tests. There was only two of us, so we batted, bowled and fielded everything, it was exhausting but fun. So much so that one day I forgot to be home in good time for the family dinner, which we had at 6:30 when my dad came home from work. I strolled casually through the garden to find the back door firmly locked and the family eating dinner in full sight. I knocked, banged and shouted but was met with silence. I was out there until they had finished their dinner, my mum had cleared the dishes away and was then let in and sent to my room with no dinner.

I attended Longsands Comprehensive School for the remainder of the Spring Term and in that period, I took my 11 plus exams to Kimbolton and Bedford School, both public schools in the area. I was subsequently offered a bursary place at Bedford School and so in September 1979 I started a five-year trek into Bedford, a town 15 miles away to make new friends alongside my existing ones in St. Neots. The two factions never met in that period and I am not sure if my personality adapted to each set of circumstances, but I do know that I had some decent mates on both sides and, in fact, I am mates with some of them today.

Whilst St. Neots was made up of trying to meet girls, underage drinking, fishing, table tennis and backyard cricket, Bedford was made up of messing about in class, playing cricket, not fulfilling my ability and generally wasting the little money that my parents had. For even though I received a bursary that covered my fees, they still had to pay for things like books, sports equipment, trips away etc. And, whilst I was joyfully arsing about, they were struggling financially and mentally.

My dad was at work all day and in the evenings he tried his hand at entrepreneurship to earn some extra money. He built a copper-winding machine in his asthmatic son’s bedroom and spent the evenings making copper bobbins and covering my room in tiny particles of copper dust. I also remember the carpet being hazardous if you didn’t wear slippers due to the sharp shards of copper wire on the floor. In about 1982 he changed his role in the company from being in the laboratory developing products to selling them. Armed with a beige Ford Sierra and an expense account he set about driving the length and breadth of the country selling whatever it is they made, leaving my mum to cope with an unruly 15-year-old and his protégé. These were difficult times for her, she had come from this large family with social standing and high expectations and married my dad, proffering only dreams of bright lights and wealth. To be fair to him, he did provide both but only after he left the old company moved to Siemens and we moved to Basingstoke, but in 1982 things were tough to the point of my mum having mental health issues. This surfaced in some strange ways, for example I bought a gift set of Brut deodorant and after shave to impress the fine young ladies of St. Neots and she hit the roof. Maybe she was ahead of her time and realised that Brut was horrible and wouldn’t improve my chances with the fairer sex, but I suspect it was because she had no cash for food, and I was buying shit for myself. Maybe I should have bought new school shoes with my paper round money instead as my only pair had large holes in them and I used to stuff newspaper in to stop my feet getting wet. There must have been other incidents too as one day she locked herself in the bathroom and downed some Domestos bleach. She didn’t lock the door so it must have been a cry for help as opposed to a suicide attempt, but whatever it was, she clearly felt at such a low ebb to have even thought about, let alone actioned, it.

Today she is a mild, old lady who cooks for her grandchildren and does the crossword in her conservatory, whilst my dad potters about writing stories for the Kannada Balaga magazine and occasionally annoying the letters editor at The Daily Telegraph with tales of old India. You wouldn’t think that this old dear struggled so much with adapting to a life that she may not have always chosen and, in despair, took to bleach. I could add the usual parenting methodologies of the time, but they will only detract from the fact that I was a cocky little shit who went to a posh public school and thought he was better than the very people who brought him into the world.

You are also probably wondering what the Kannada Balaga is? And this brings my dad back into the picture, for when he wasn’t working, he was working to set up the association for people who came from the state of Karnataka in India and/or spoke the native language of Kannada. Balaga means association. Funnily given my mum’s background, she doesn’t really care about her heritage, well not to the extent of my dad, who was brought up by his uncle and aunt in rural India. But he was an ambitious bugger and determined to rise through society and being a player in the local language community was his ladder. As I said earlier, we never lived in a community of other Asians and so the Kannada-speaking diaspora was spread out all over the country. So in the pre-internet era, the way of connecting was a newsletter and an annual meeting.

One a year, as a family, we donned our best outfits and traipsed off to somewhere in either the Midlands or the North to take part in what were loosely called cultural activities. There was an AGM where people droned on about amending the constitution to allow free samosas for anyone over 50 and then a vote where the incumbents were re-elected. Adil Ray’s hilarious character Mr. Khan from the BBC comedy Citizen Khan, would have been proud as the community leaders were given another term. My dad was in the midst of this nascent activity and loved every second of the attention. He held the esteemed position of President at some stage, but in the mid-1980s he was organising the cultural activities. Now, whilst he likes traditional dance and music, he also realised that if he wanted the youth of the day to follow in their parents’ footsteps this cultural shindig needed to be interesting. So he organised debates on stage, discos and even a stand-up comedy hour. Guess who was asked to lead all those activities. Not that I minded, the DJ role and loosely termed stand-up routine were an opportunity to have girls asking if they could see you again. Obviously, my mum said no. But the debates were interesting as we there were generally six of us on stage debating something relevant to being a British Asian. Now, we were the first generation and so the audience was made up of parents, vis a vis immigrants who maybe weren’t too happy with my ideas around marriage. I remember once when I suggested that arranged marriages were an outdated concept, well my parents didn’t have one, and this bloke had a major huff and shouted out that ‘this was a disgrace and that the (y)executive committee should have been consulted first.’ Say it in an Indian accent, it will be funny. My dad, on the other hand, was quite proud and I revelled in the infamy.

Back In Bedford, life was the usual school routine. Getting up at an ungodly hour to have a ‘bucket bath,’ a pre-concept where you filled up a bucket in the bath tub and chucked water on yourself whilst trying to simultaneously soap and stay warm. Two buckets were the maximum allowed and you better be prepared for a knock on the door if the tap went for a third time. Then I dressed in my school uniform, apart from a Wednesday where I went on the public 128 bus dressed as Indian GI Joe because I somehow chose CCF (Combined cadet Force) as my extracurricular activity, and joined a few other public school students who lived in St. Neots. In those days, Bedford had five public schools, they have since consolidated, and so a few of us from the various schools formed a little clique at the back of the bus. The way there was always full, but because we all finished at different times, the return trip was a bit sketchy for numbers. As I caught the bus after it had left the bus station, I was able to dip my head in see if the cool kids were at the back and if they were to hop on. This meant that they may have cigarettes, failing which there was always a half-smoked Benson & Hedges under a seat. I remember one day sitting at the small round table in our home and my mum asking me if I smoked. I obviously blamed the bus, for you could smoke on a bus in those days, when she returned with a packed of John Player Specials and a box of matches from my jacket. Cue no dinner for me.

I arsed about at school. I was a decent cricketer and represented the school at age group levels, culminating in the captaincy of the Colts XI in my 5^th form. We all had to play rugby and I made one solitary appearance for the football 1^st XI. But cricket was my game and with the correct mental attitude I could have progressed, but I only learned this a few later when playing in Hong Kong. I took 13 ‘O’ Levels, as GCSEs were called in those days, and crawled through with six passes all at ‘C’ grade. For all the time and money spent on my education, that was a pitiful output. But Bedord was a fun place to go to school, very little bullying and no racism, that I knew of anyway, from the boys there. I wonder whether that was indicative of the school environment, that I projected a sense of self-confidence or that I was a coconut. Maybe all three. Whatever it was, I had a good time at school and so came as a shock when in December 1984 we upped sticks again and moved to Basingstoke.

Amazingstoke

A move to Siemens was the making of my dad. He had become a bit of an expert in an obscure subject and the Germans wanted him on their side. So they offered him a decent job and he never looked back. He did try his hand at entrepreneurship but wasn’t very good at it. They say the apple never falls far from the tree. I think we both share the same gifts and failings, being ahead of our time and being crap at execution. He saw years before anyone banged on about sustainability that plastic bags were bad and he imported jute versions from India. He also spotted the trend for artisan coffee light years before Howard Schultz wrote Onward!, but again poor execution. This was clearly shown by his choice of brand name for the coffee beans. One day boxes upon boxes arrived at or house and inside were gold coloured catering pack sized bags for coffee beans emblazoned with the words Mysore Nuggets. So what, you may say? Now re-read the packaging as my sore nuggets and you will get a sense of why they remained in their garage for years.

I started my A Levels at Bedford School and finished them at Queen Mary’s College, the local sixth form which was a 20-minute walk from our house. There was a lad who lived three doors down, we became firm friends and walked in together. He too hadn’t gone to school in Basingstoke and so was on the same boat as me. It didn’t take long to make friends and so the same behaviour as Bedford continued. Primary objective of an educational institution is to have fun, meet girls and generally mess about without annoying the teachers or missing any lessons. I didn’t annoy teachers deliberately, well maybe once where we spent the entire lunch break at Bedford wrapping sheets of A4 paper into balls to pelt the maths teacher. The worst bit was that I missed a Bedford School lunch, they were phenomenal.

Six of us became firm friends, bound by a love of the BBC comedy, The Young Ones, a series that epitomised 1980s student life. It helped that one of us looked like the late, great Rik Mayall. Hint, it wasn’t me. We became the self-styled The Masked Grundies, taking inspiration from Rik Mayall’s character, who was a wannabe anarchist and self-proclaimed "people's poet." In one scene, he says:

"Look, I'm a complete bastard, I admit it! But I am not a fascist! And that's why I wear these!" And he out his underpants on his head.
"These are my masked grundies!”

Quite why we chose this as our motif is unknown to me, but I do know that it bound us into a tight little group and that on lads holidays to Majorca and Tenerife we assaulted the bars and clubs with Masked Grundies t-shirts and pants on our heads. I often wonder why we were so unsuccessful with girls. Outside of summers in the sun, I played a lot of cricket for a local team, made up of some very interesting characters who stole milk floats, beat people up with irons bars and generally acted in a fashion alien to this public school boy. Nonethless, I played there for a total of twenty years, thoroughly enjoyed it and made some amazing, lasting friendships.

Basingstoke was where I had my only and only fight. We had lost one of the MGs and asked a drunk lad if he had seen ‘a short, fat lad wearing a chequered shirt?’ His answer of ‘do you want a fight,’ caused some surprise but moved swiftly on to punches being thrown, me being called a P”ki. I remember this, not for the fight so much but it was the first time that I had been called that and I was 18 years of age at that point. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times it has happened to me. Others will have had it happen to them on a daily basis, but I was lucky I guess.

A Levels went slightly better than my O Levels, BCD if I remember correctly, with the ‘B’ coming in Economics and with my dad’s advice of ‘just get a degree I business’ ringing in my ears, I set of to City of London Polytechnic to commence a degree in accountancy. My wife is a qualified accountant, and when she learned of this said, ‘interesting – one of two things would have happened. Either you would have been brilliant, or in jail.’ This funnily enough echoed what my dad said a few years later, ‘Sanju (my nickname) will either be a complete failure or complete success. No middle ground.’ Well we will find out won’t we.

University(s)

I fucking hated accountancy but enjoyed student life and London. We lived in digs in Bethnal Green, and in those days you couldn’t have paid me enough money to go to Shoreditch, Bow, Mile End or Stepney. The National Front, the BNP’s older and more vicious brother, operated in those areas at that time and any wandering p”ki would get an almighty shoeing. Funny looking at those gentrified areas now. The boxer Charlie Magri had a sports shop with bright yellow signage on the high street and just off this is Vallance Road, home to the Krays. The house isn’t there now, but it was in 1986 and I was casually wandering down the road when a huge motherfucker stepped out and politely asked me to cross over. I didn’t argue but knew that I was near the Kray’s house and whilst the twins were in jail, it was obvious that something was going down, as they say. Suffice to say, I spent more time playing pool and listening to The Final Countdown, by Europe, more Swedish popsters. The appropriate nature of that title came home to roost later that summer when I failed the first year and wanted to end my education there.

Now this book isn’t just about me banging on about my life, the good and the bad, although it contains a fair amount of that. What it is supposed to do is provide an insight into the mindset of someone who had no fucking plan at all. So in the summer of 1987, I had a grand total of six O Levels at C, three A levels and a failed first year of university on my CV. I didn’t want to go back to City and redo my first year, in fact I didn’t want to go back to Uni at all, but my dad did the hard yards and, through clearing, got me a place at Hatfield Polytechnic, now the University of Hertfordshire.

Time for some analysis and reflection. Firstly, thank you to my dad for sorting his sorry arse of a son out with a new Uni place. He probably thought, ‘if I don’t do this then what will become of his life, he needs to get a degree to have any chance in getting a good job. Let alone the money that we have spent on his education.’ What neither he nor I considered was whether I wanted to get a ‘good job’ and whether I would be better placed doing something non-officey. As it turned out, I was pretty good at drawing, writing (ahem) and cooking and talking, so maybe the universe’s plan for me was different to the non-plan that I had. But off to Hatfield Poly I went. And that was an adventure.

Having looked around Uni accommodation recently, I was staggered at the plushness of it all and the care and attention placed on student amenities and welfare. These mini hotels were in stark contrast to 1980s student housing. The Bethnal Green affair was alright to be fair, five rooms in a ground floor apartment within a halls of residence complex. The four external corners of the building had the main amenities that any self-respected student could want namely a pub, a laundrette, a convenience store and a strip club. The business and humanities school of Hatfield Poly was based in the little town of Hertford in a mid-17th century mansion called Balls Park built by Sir John Harrison, a wealthy financier and customs official under Charles I. The estate is famously believed to have inspired Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. The long drive that swept up to it was majestic and a long way from the grittiness of Bethnal Green. However, London E2 had one major thing in its favour – it had a bed for me. I turned up at Balls Park, not sure if I got driven up or got the train, to find that me and about twenty others who had gained admission via the clearing system had no bed for the night, week or month. Hastily made arrangements meant that we had to sleep on the floor of the common room until something became available. A couple of lads in due course managed to get themselves a house in Ware, about three miles away, and invited me to doss on their floor instead, an offer I gratefully accepted. One slight hitch, the Italian ice cream man, from whom the house was rented kept a strict vigil outside to make sure no one else was staying there rent free. So I had to leave the house by 8am and could only be back after 6pm in case Mr. Whippy noticed me in situ. My luck did turn when a small room became available in the White Lodge, the gatehouse of the mansion. Rumours were afoot that the availability was caused by a student committing suicide from the window.

Consistent with my other years of education, I made friends quickly and had a great time to Balls Park. I had enrolled in a BA (Hons) Business Studies, a four year course that included a placement year. The first year passed smoothly enough and I passed, so year two beckoned for this reformed soul. I shared a house in Ware with four others and, whilst it was a complete shithole, it was a good fun and we had regular visits from both other students and the black cab neighbour who seemed to dislike our way of life. The second year progressed without much incident, or work, so I was pleased to pass it. However in that year there was the thorny question of where to do my third year, the placement. Advertisements for placements had been up on the board for months and the keener ones had got their shit together and applied, been to interviews and been accepted. Some went to ICI, to Mars and one mate drove a blue van stocked with confectionary and went into corner shops and rearranged their merchandise for them. I was playing ‘Triv for the Tea,’ i.e playing one card of trivial pursuits each and the loser made the tea and watching Top Gun and The Breakfast Club, admittedly two of the best but not much use in my search for a placement. I ended up getting a role at Dupont in Pin Green, Stevenage.

I needed a car to get from my digs in Luton, where I rented a room in a two bed flat with an old friend, who also owned it. So I bought a yellow Datsun Sunny hatchback from a friend of my parents. That car could be a chapter in itself. I turned up at Stevenage and was assigned the task of managing the spare parts for the blood testing machine that this department was selling. The sales team were on the road and would call in to tell me what spare parts they needed and I would place the order with Big Pete, the warehouse manager in Warrington, Lancs. I had to go there once, my god. Anyway, BP turned out to be a top bloke and sensed that I might be good for a bit of a hustle and told me about his dodgy watch import business. Stevenage was one of those up-and-coming towns popular with young and sometimes married couples and they were ripe for a couple of schemes. The dodgy watch business being one and the other involved a fellow placement year student who worked in the warehouse of a popular brand that made kitchen and bathroom utensils. We deduced that he could set me up as a cash client and that I could sell the good folk of Stevenage kitchen and bathrrom utensils at, let’s say, ex-factory prices. The fact that we paid nothing for them is by the by. So I supplemented my meagre Dupont salary with some trades that would never make it into my thesis.

In my second year and through my placement year I had a steady girlfriend who was a year below us at Uni. Her parents lived up in Rutland and let’s say they weren’t overly keen with their only daughter’s choice of boyfriend. That didn’t deter us, and we would go there for weekends usually in the black MG Metro Sport that her dad had bought for her. Once I went up in Jake, the name she had given my Datsun, because she was already there. Every Sunday, I used to stuff newspaper in the large rust holes that formed the majority of the body, cover them in gauze and spray paint it to the nearest puke yellow. I had fitted some house speakers in the back, it was a long hatchback, and armed with enough cassette tapes to see me through the journey, I started off. Actually, all of this is irrelevant as I got there ok and we probably had a good weekend. Obviously I had to be back at my desk by 9am Monday morning and so I set up from her house nice and early, to the relief of her parents. About 10 minutes after I joined the A1, there was a clunking noise and left front wheel flew off and merrily bounced its way into a petrol station. Now resembling the yellow three-wheeler favoured by the Trotter brothers in another BBC comedy Only Fools and Horses, Jake veered into a ditch leaving me the walk of shame to collect my wheel from the garage and roll it alongside a major highway and await the recovery vehicle.

I spent some part of my placement year in Belfast, staying at the Europa Hotel then the most bombed hotel in Europe and whilst nothing happened during my residence there, Northern Ireland was an eye opener for I had ever seen guns on the street before. And that was the British army. But dear reader, my thesis I did finish and I moved hopping and skipping to my final year.

That was interesting, not for any housing reasons but because I had no cash. I had spent everything from my placement year thinking that I would get my usual grant from the government. We all got grants and not loans in those days. But as my dad started to earn more money, my grant went down and, as I didn’t get anything to top that up, I had no money and had to work, So here I was, trying to pass my degree and I spent a lot of time working in a local pub. If it wasn’t for the good graces of my two flat mates, one of whom was subsequently an usher at my wedding, who let me copy my notes, who knows what would have happened. I went to less than five lectures in my fourth year and, despites the gloomy forecasts from the course head, I gained a 2:2 and I was an honours graduate.

One thing that unexpectantly happened is that I fell in love with the hospitality industry and wanted to become a chef. Which is interesting as two of my ‘highlights’ in the kitchen were cabbage curry, when that is all we had in the cupboard and an interesting chicken in strawberry sauce, when we had too much in the cupboard. I went back to Basingstoke and spent a few, hard months working as a grill cook in the local Beefeater, a chain of steak restaurants that were popular in the 1990s. I worked a split shift, in that I did lunch and dinner with a three-hour break in between. I lived at my parents’ house, and it was too far to go home during that break, so we went down the pub instead. For six days a week I would drink three pints in between shifts and then three after the dinner service, with the odd one here and there, that amounted to 40 pints a week. I was working to save money for a round-the-world trip, but my actions were taking me on a different journey. I must have pulled myself together for I did buy a ticket and in November of 1991, I boarded a flight to Bombay and onwards to Hong Kong, Thailand, Australia and home, via Hong Kong.

I was 24 at this stage, an interesting life to date, a degree that I hadn’t necessarily wanted but had nonetheless and a possible dream to enter the catering profession and become a chef, then who knows, a restaurateur. But like everything up to that point, the dream was not supported by a sense of conviction or a strong enough desire to get on and do it. As always, I let other people determine my future for me.