It's a strange thing, this looking back. I'm beginning to wonder how my career might have panned out if I'd stayed at those early places longer than I did. But the IBM job was only ever going to be temporary (there was a freeze on recruitment at the time, so a permanent post was completely out of the question). Anyway, I already had my second job arranged, so there was no point in hanging around any longer.
But, although my second job at BDP was permanent, somehow I never saw it as offering any long-term future. Why, I don't know. I stayed, I think, for about a year and then I returned to the warm bosom of academe and a post-graduate research fellowship at Manchester Polytechnic. Although, for lots or reasons too tedious to mention here, the bosom of Manchester wasn't quite as warm and comforting as I'd expected. And so I've decided to skip those parts of my career when I wasn't actually working as a designer (not least because this blog can't justify a day trip to Manchester just to photograph a building). But leaving Manchester and returning to employment in London was pretty darn difficult - not the doing, but finding a job. Which is how I came to wind up here:
Working on the third floor (or maybe it was the fourth) of the London College of Furniture (now - like nearly every other college in the country - part of a University) as a graphics technician. It's in a part of London that's best described as gritty. And I spent most of my time there not wanting to be there. But it took me a while to escape.
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