My first pay packet came to me in September 1976 in a barn, in the form of an envelope that had £15.20 in it, being forty times the £0.38p hourly rate at which Jim Bennett valued my services on bale cart.
Subsequent ones, from employment as varied as removing weld spots in a factory to selling Christmas decorations in Harrods (from which role I was fired for rudeness), and from picking Brussels sprouts for an appalling bully on the Chichester plain to mowing next door’s lawn, gently introduced me into the notion that work was normal, even for lazy people like me.
For five months, I then washed up dishes in a Swiss hotel, and was paid monthly in arrears into the Banque Cantonale du Valais, an account I only kept going once I got home so that I could impress future girl friends (‘I have a Swiss bank account, you know’) until it ran out of cash one day because I had failed to read the small print. In Switzerland, it turned out, you paid to have a bank account, not the other way around.
Then I got paid not very much to learn how to kill people, until Margaret Thatcher came along and paid me rather more to do the same job. This included, I seem to remember, a shilling that came directly from Her Majesty to compensate me for the fact that someone out there might actually like to kill me, too. Mercifully, if that someone planned it, it stayed as a plan.
This week, thirty-five years after I left the army, I will receive my final pay cheque as someone on the staff of my long-suffering employers and, for the first time in my life, will be self-employed. Every penny I earn will come, directly or indirectly, from the words I share with the world from this computer. Spare a thought for those who try to do this trick in their twenties and thirties.
I feel a great sense of gratitude to and solidarity with my friends at Dexam for all we have gone through together. People who work for the public sector often don’t understand the sheer precariousness of private enterprise, and the uncertainty of outcomes of decisions that we make. In those thirty-five years, I have only met five complete bastards, (one German, one French and three British), and none of them inside my own company. As it happens, two of them should certainly be in prison. Many of the others, not the bastards obviously, are lifelong friends.
The worst moment of all was when our lead Barclays banker, who was visiting us when we didn’t even know if we had enough cash to pay our staff at the end of the month, so as to see if he was going to pull the rug on us, turned up in his golfing clothes.
‘I never miss an opportunity to get 18 holes in at Hindhead when I am down this way,’ he said. ‘It’s glorious there.’ We just about threw him out of the building, and I still wish that I had let his tyres down.
The best moments are too countless to remember, but pulling a plastic lobster slowly across the aisle of a busy German trade show in front of three Japanese buyers has to come close, but only because one of the buyers tried to kill it with his briefcase. I did business in 28 different countries in five continents, and learned along the way how the real links in business aren’t the Linked in ones, so much as real friendships. It turned out that an industry that makes its living out of selling things to help people cook nice food is a very nice industry indeed.
Then, one day, I was asked to be President of our industry’s trading association, with gold chain and all. There is no false modesty behind my saying that, when I asked why on earth someone as unsuitable as me had been invited to this dubious honour, I was told ‘we can’t think of anyone else who won’t piss most people off.’ It is still the biggest compliment I have ever received. When I left four years later, I had actually done a reasonably good job. My sons, who were well old enough to know better, referred to me as ‘Head of Spoons’, and the name stuck.
So Head of Spoons is now on his own, the comfortable architecture of a collegiate working life stripped away. It is a life where often the things that I miss the most are the things that I thought frustrated me the deepest, and where the most terrifying moments of near insolvency were actually the most dizzyingly exciting moments of all. If we had had a water cooler, I would miss it, but we didn’t. But I will very much miss Bryony, Howard, Tom and all the others.
Coffee breaks will never be the same.
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