This is an autobiography, limited to 600 words, written about three years ago for a writing competition that I obviously didn't win...
It is a little out of date, but hey, I have been busy with work and so I thought that it would be better to post this than nothing, and you will learn some things about me you wouldn't otherwise know... And PS, the girl is you A, not you C, and now I am very happily engaged to be married to my dahling F...
Sitting in a bare classroom with ten 10-year-old boys looking to shoot me down. This is where the test really started: Sunday school.
Whoever said that public speaking is hard certainly wasn't lying, add in a dash of sour souvenirs from an all-male education, a twist of poor preparation and shake it all together over a foreign language and you begin to understand what I was feeling when confronted with these ten small boys waiting for their new Sunday school teacher to make a mistake. I was 18, I was working in a small Baptist church in the suburbs south of Paris in a place called Massy as a church worker. Why? Well, it was a way to open my adult life, and the best option open to me, so I found myself teaching boys the story of Jonah, feeling a certain empathy for the guy that gets swallowed by a whale only to be spat out a few days later.
Then there was university... I went to Leeds, I studied, I left, and found myself once again in Paris, this time via Granada, Spain.
In Paris I endeavoured to pursue my dream of one day owning a restaurant and proceeded to work in a well-heeled wine bar and bistro where I developed my already highly tuned tastes for the finer things in this world. Perhaps a product of my suburban public school education, which I dismissed at the time as snobbish, elitist and completely alien to me, probably more out of contempt for my classmates than out of a true belief in the ideals these principles represented.
So it was I not only came to learn the difference between good and bad champagne, but also develop a taste for the good stuff, sipping it in pleasant bars in the company of bourgeois cosmopolitan model types. So I worked hard and I partied hard for two years until the realisation that I was not going to own my restaurant simply by working as a waiter, no matter how good I was. It is the eternal myth of waiters, the thing that keeps many professionals in the restaurant business, putting up with poor pay, and even worse hours: the myth that one day they will be boss, one day all this will be theirs. It won't.
I left the wine bar, I moved on, I decided that I would try something new: I wrote. Another cliche in Paris. To add to the cliches I then fell in love. Not a simple affair of boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy gets girl (if anyone has ever heard of a simple affair of this type I would love to hear it), but the slightly more complex, boy meets girl, boy becomes best friend with girl, boy falls for girl, girl is not interested in that way.
So after some painful times, some therapy, a lot of fun and a lot of growing up, I decided that a new life-plan was required, one that involved being responsible, and a little bit adult, so I came to the conclusion that it was time to go back to London for an extended visit.
The tears welled as the realisation hit. I was leaving and there was nothing I could do about it. I was leaving, and when I came back things were not going to be the same. It didn't matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise, things could not and would not be the same. To start with I was going to have to get a job!
Until next time dahlings, (when I promise to give you something original) that was me...
It is a little out of date, but hey, I have been busy with work and so I thought that it would be better to post this than nothing, and you will learn some things about me you wouldn't otherwise know... And PS, the girl is you A, not you C, and now I am very happily engaged to be married to my dahling F...
Sitting in a bare classroom with ten 10-year-old boys looking to shoot me down. This is where the test really started: Sunday school.
Whoever said that public speaking is hard certainly wasn't lying, add in a dash of sour souvenirs from an all-male education, a twist of poor preparation and shake it all together over a foreign language and you begin to understand what I was feeling when confronted with these ten small boys waiting for their new Sunday school teacher to make a mistake. I was 18, I was working in a small Baptist church in the suburbs south of Paris in a place called Massy as a church worker. Why? Well, it was a way to open my adult life, and the best option open to me, so I found myself teaching boys the story of Jonah, feeling a certain empathy for the guy that gets swallowed by a whale only to be spat out a few days later.
Then there was university... I went to Leeds, I studied, I left, and found myself once again in Paris, this time via Granada, Spain.
In Paris I endeavoured to pursue my dream of one day owning a restaurant and proceeded to work in a well-heeled wine bar and bistro where I developed my already highly tuned tastes for the finer things in this world. Perhaps a product of my suburban public school education, which I dismissed at the time as snobbish, elitist and completely alien to me, probably more out of contempt for my classmates than out of a true belief in the ideals these principles represented.
So it was I not only came to learn the difference between good and bad champagne, but also develop a taste for the good stuff, sipping it in pleasant bars in the company of bourgeois cosmopolitan model types. So I worked hard and I partied hard for two years until the realisation that I was not going to own my restaurant simply by working as a waiter, no matter how good I was. It is the eternal myth of waiters, the thing that keeps many professionals in the restaurant business, putting up with poor pay, and even worse hours: the myth that one day they will be boss, one day all this will be theirs. It won't.
I left the wine bar, I moved on, I decided that I would try something new: I wrote. Another cliche in Paris. To add to the cliches I then fell in love. Not a simple affair of boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy gets girl (if anyone has ever heard of a simple affair of this type I would love to hear it), but the slightly more complex, boy meets girl, boy becomes best friend with girl, boy falls for girl, girl is not interested in that way.
So after some painful times, some therapy, a lot of fun and a lot of growing up, I decided that a new life-plan was required, one that involved being responsible, and a little bit adult, so I came to the conclusion that it was time to go back to London for an extended visit.
The tears welled as the realisation hit. I was leaving and there was nothing I could do about it. I was leaving, and when I came back things were not going to be the same. It didn't matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise, things could not and would not be the same. To start with I was going to have to get a job!
Until next time dahlings, (when I promise to give you something original) that was me...
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