What jobs have you had?
How I Became a Writer Without Quite Noticing
I’ve been paid to work in one form or another for over fifty years, beginning with painting nettles and slashing back rusting metal fences on the estate of a medieval castle in Cumbria at the age of fourteen. As a teenager age fifteen I worked a few hours a day in the holidays in a builders’ merchants, hauling tiles in and out of warehouses – Dad wanted me to learn the business. Most surreal of all, at sixteen I spent nine weeks as an extra in a Disney film being shot in Alnwick Castle. Being six feet tall and male got me selected as one of King Arthur’s ‘King’s Guard Special’.
After that my life rarely followed a straight career ladder. I had school and university to complete for starters. My gap year was spent working in a luxury hotel in the French ski resort of Val d’Isere.
I drifted naturally toward storytelling, communication and visual media. I shot videos, wrote scripts, edited films and eventually became a producer and director. My graduate career briefly took me into advertising at J. Walter Thompson before I moved into television and corporate production, later setting up my own production company.
Along the way I’ve also worked as a hospital porter, magazine advertising salesman, copywriter and mural painter. Back in France I found myself working as a sound engineer, vision mixer, translator of cartoons from French into English, and even a script assessor for Gaumont.
Then came another reinvention when the internet arrived. I moved into online education, web publishing and learning technology, eventually working in higher education and digital learning while also developing a parallel life as a historian of the First World War. More recently my working lives have included swimming teacher and coach, printmaker, blogger, tree surveyor, environmental volunteer and town councillor.
Looking back, the connecting thread is not the job titles but curiosity. I’ve always said yes to interesting worlds — castles, film sets, swimming pools, classrooms, editing suites, woodlands, archives and council chambers alike.
Alongside all the formal jobs ran three continuous threads: writing, drawing and music. I kept diaries for decades, later becoming a blogger with thousands of posts online. For years I sketched constantly too, often drawing as much as I wrote. And until my thirties there was always a guitar nearby — songs, singing, busking, performing.
The strange thing is that writing now occupies perhaps sixty hours a week of my life, even though much of it remains unpaid. Researching, drafting, revising, blogging, shaping memoir and fiction from fifty years of notebooks and memory. Is that a job? I increasingly think it is. The labour, discipline and commitment are real enough.
There were moments when the worlds overlapped professionally: I sold and directed a short film for Channel 4, worked for production companies, wrote commercially, and came close to traditional publication, reaching proof stage. But perhaps I’ve come to think of writing less as a career ladder and more as a lifelong practice — the continuous thread running through everything else.
My current project to put my diaries online, one day at a time, over several years, will take at least five years. There are about 2.5 million words to get through. As for old screenplays and manuscripts, I have no idea if they’ll ever see the light of day.
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