I did a short video last Friday when I got to the afternoon and suddenly realised, it was the 8th July. That is the date I first set foot in the UK, back in 1992. Somehow, that is thirty years ago. Three zero. I have now lived way more of my life in Britain than in my birth country, Australia.
I remember the day I got on the plane from Sydney to London. My parents held back tears and I teased them for crying. ‘It’s only two years!’ I said. ‘It’ll go so quickly.’
Back then I believed it. In fact there were many times in the beginning when I found living in another city so hard that I thought I’d turn tail in months, not years.
I don’t like wishing my life aw,ay but I often look forward to the times I can look back. I’ve come to learn that it’s a huge help for me in stressful phases. ‘Living in the moment’ is all well and good, until the moment you’re in right now is bloody awful, actually. And then what sustains me is thinking, ‘Yeah, it’s tough right now, but just imagine a year from now. This will have changed and you’ll have moved forward and you’ll have achieved x, and maybe even y and z.’
In my last job, at You magazine, the early days were very challenging for me. It was my first new job in 17 years, at a time when my self-confidence was pretty fragile, and being tasked with bringing lots of change to a team who were set in their ways of doing things. I’m not trying to swipe at anyone with that - if you’re a team who’ve worked together for more than a decade, you’re going to have your rhythms and it’s going to be as hard on you - as it is for a new leader - when things need a shake-up.
In those times, when it feels like I’ve been given a colander and asked to go and please drain the ocean, I look to the future. I comfort myself with the idea that, in a year from now, I will have the chance to look back and think, ‘Oh OK, yeah. I did manage to achieve some stuff.’
I think this way of thinking is what stopped me from running back to Australia quite a few times in late 1992/early 1993. It was tough. I didn’t really have any money. I’d been applying for jobs - bar work, waitressing - but not really getting anywhere. There were a lot of backpacking Aussies in London chasing the same work. Then came the day that, despite all my scrimping - I was sleeping on the floor in a room I shared with two male friends - I was down to my last £300, all of which needed to go on rent.
A friend of a friend managed to get me a ‘trial shift’ at a fancy new Soho restaurant. It was called Dell Ugo, on Frith Street, founded by Antony Worrall Thompson. On this day, they were testing about half a dozen of us and I knew during my shift that I was sucking at this. In a room full of professionals who’d trained in fine dining, silver service etc, my Pizza Hut experience wasn’t really cutting it. At clocking-off time, they said they’d call us the next day if we were hired.
Of course I realised they wouldn’t call me, but the next day, when it got to nearly 5pm and the phone stayed belligerently silent, I decided I had nothing to lose in calling them. Just to be sure. Maybe they wrote my number down wrong. Maybe there was something wrong with the line. All the usual bullshit I used to tell myself back then if a boy hadn’t phoned, lol. Also similar: I was desperate. I was dangerously low on funds now. My family wasn’t the sort who could just drop some cash into your account and besides, my parents had their own money worries and three other kids. I’d made the decision to come to the other side of the world. I felt strongly that it was all on me to try and figure this out.
Shame be damned, I phoned: ‘Oh hi, I was just wondering if after the training day yesterday there was any news on starting dates.’ The woman on the other end said, ‘OK so we need the successful people from yesterday’s training day to be here tomorrow at 9am.’
And here’s where I decided to play a naivety loophole. I just styled it out and turned up. No one said anything and I got my uniform and hit the floor with a waiter to show me the ropes. At the end of my shift, a manager pulled me aside and said, ‘Um… I’ve just realised that we didn’t ask you to come back today.’ Rumbled, my heart sank but I feigned surprise. ‘Oh right! Um… well I phoned yesterday and was just told to be here, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise.’
To my utter amazement, he said, ‘Oh well, you’re here now. See you tomorrow.’
And that’s how I got my waitressing job at a posh Soho restaurant.
I mean… I continued to suck at it. I nearly took a woman’s eye out with a Champagne cork. Once, during a hellishly busy dinner service I fell flat on my back, loaded up with five plates of freshly-prepared meals and I’m pretty sure everyone in the kitchen wished me dead at that moment. One of the chefs used to regularly say to me, ‘Oh no, is it you today?’ But slowly I did learn to suck less at it and it meant I earned some badly-needed rent money (from memory £3.40 an hour plus tips). Bonus: I worked so many hours I never got the chance to spend any of it.
All the while I was using any spare moments to apply for magazine jobs. But that too was tricky and rejection-tastic.
Once, on my way to an interview with a major magazine company, I slipped and twisted my ankle. My portfolio of published articles from my Aussie Dolly magazine days went flying all over the street. The pain was so unbelievable I started crying. A woman said, ‘Are you OK?’ as she stepped over me and kept on walking. I gathered it all up as best I could, dried my face, hoping I didn’t look too mascara-stained and staggered the remaining five minute walk to the meeting.
I felt so despairing and lonely that I did consider just turning around and forgetting all about it, being a no-show. But the dramatically romantic Piscean in me piped up. As I could feel my ankle swell in my too tight boots, I convinced myself that this could well be my magazine origin story. ‘Yes you’re feeling sad right now and there isn’t anyone in this whole city who cares that you might have even broken something down there, but…. BUT…. it’ll just make it more brilliant when you go in there and ace this interview and get this job.’ I think I had even put the song The Greatest Love of All on repeat in my head as a motivational soundtrack.
As I limped towards my interviewer to shake her hand, I decided to break the ice with, ‘Ha, I’m so embarrassed but you won’t believe what I’ve just done.’ Nothing. Not a smile, not a laugh, not even a faked whimper of sympathy. Stony silence.
Yeah I didn’t get that job. So ‘looking forward’ didn’t pay off majorly that time but I do think I’d have been full of regret and questions if I had just swerved that interview.
It took a good six months of buying The Guardian every Monday (the place to advertise media vacancies back in the day), writing applications, often in the company of my flatmate at the time, James. We would trudge to the post office together, wondering if this weekly routine of ours would ever pay off.
In March 1993, I had an interview with TV Hits Magazine and on this particular day, after getting home from my waitressing shift at 2am, I slept through my alarm. I woke up 20 minutes after I was supposed to be sitting down with them. After crying with frustration and anger at myself, I decided to phone them and see if there was any chance in hell that they would forgive the unforgivable. It really is Rule One of ‘Mistakes Not To Make’, well bloody done, Elvin. Fully expecting to be told to just forget it, for some reason these wonderful human beings told me to just get there (‘you muppet’ was left unsaid but strongly implied) as soon as I could.
I think I spent the first 20 minutes saying what a moron I was for letting that happen and apologising over and over again. But I got the job - deputy editor of TV Hits magazine, the break that started everything in London for me. Pauline Haldane, Editor, and Chris Taggart, Publishing Director, I owe you everything. Because getting that job gave me the courage I needed to stay in London and keep going. I came to pursue a career but I’ve gotten so much more than that.
It’s wonderful to move to another country. But it’s also incredibly emotionally complicated. I’ll write about that another time. Because it’s damn hot where I’m writing this and now I really want a Magnum.
But to conclude: If there’s a message at all in this ramble today, I’d say it’s don’t listen to people who say there’s no value in looking back. Every now and then, reflect on what you’ve done. It always helps me in any current moment of doubt.
You had the courage to take chances. Many others wouldn’t have phoned the restaurant or the magazine. Weirdly, it paid off.
Such a great description of “failing forward to success”😊