Crete, Ibiza & A Mildly Dramatic Career Plot Twist

The last time I posted, I mentioned something brewing professionally. I’ll get to that. It’s now resolved, and the resolution is good, and it turns out the road to it went through Ibiza and Crete and a moment in Manchester that I will not be detailing but that I’ve filed under: formative.

Here’s what the last eight months looked like.

Crete, August

A week in Rethymno, which is a Venetian fort town on the north coast of Crete — old harbour, narrow streets, a long promenade of restaurants and bars, the kind of place where you arrive meaning to be active and cultural and quickly revise the plan in favour of something with ice in it.

We hired a car, which was Richard’s idea and my execution, and drove to two beaches. The first, Elafonissi, has extraordinary reviews and is, in practice, overrun, rampantly commercial, and surfaced with something that functions as sand in the broadest technical sense. We stayed forty minutes. The second, Balos, was the jackpot — you park at the top of a hill with a view that looks implausibly good, the sort of thing you’d dismiss as doctored in a photograph, and then you walk down a significant number of steps to a shallow spit beach of white sand and water the exact temperature of a warm bath. The colour of the sea there is not a colour I have elsewhere seen in nature. We stayed four hours. Richard got entirely too much sun on the back of his neck and was stoic about it in the way he is stoic about most things, which is to say not entirely.

Rethymno itself repays wandering. The old town inside the Venetian walls has the pleasingly labyrinthine quality of streets that were designed for donkeys rather than any form of vehicle, and the restaurants — the ones away from the main strip — were excellent and cheap and run by people who seemed genuinely pleased to feed us. We ate well every night. We slept well every morning. It was exactly the holiday it was supposed to be.

Gemma, who had been offered the choice of coming and had elected to stay in Horsham with my parents because apparently her social life had become sufficiently active that missing a week of it was non-trivial, texted once to ask if we’d tried the local cheese. I had not thought about cheese. I then thought about cheese. She was, as she so often is, correct.

Ibiza, September

I will be honest about Ibiza: I wasn’t sure it was going to be right for us. It has a reputation, most of which is entirely deserved, and I am forty-one and married and my clubbing years, such as they were, are not what I’d describe as recent. Richard’s view was that we’d go, enjoy the sunshine and the food, and treat anything else as optional. He was right, as he occasionally is, and I should have led with this framework rather than arriving with mild apprehension.

Eight days. A small hotel in Sant Josep — quiet by Ibiza standards, which means there were no sound systems audible from our room before midnight, which we considered a win. The days were straightforward: breakfast on the terrace, beach, lunch at wherever looked good, the particular pleasure of an afternoon that has no requirements whatsoever. The food was better than I’d expected — genuinely better, not holiday-better — and the rosé was extremely cold and extremely reasonable and we made full use of both.

We did go out one night, properly. A club in Sant Antoni where the production values were extraordinary and the music was excellent and Richard danced, which I am noting for the permanent record as the second documented instance of this phenomenon following the bloco in Rio. We left at midnight, which I maintain was the correct call and which Richard did not dispute, and had a very good dinner on the way back. I would do it again. I would do the whole thing again, at exactly this pace. Ibiza at forty-one is, it turns out, considerably better than Ibiza at twenty-five would have been, on the grounds that you can afford a decent hotel and you understand that leaving at midnight is not failure, it’s judgment.

The Surveyor Sevens

Slightly out of order, but: in May I went to the Surveyor Sevens at Richmond Rugby Club, which is a property industry networking event dressed as a rugby tournament, which in practice means a hundred and fifty surveyors standing on the touchline occasionally glancing at the rugby while primarily doing deals and drinking warm Pimm’s.

The rugby itself, when I paid attention to it, was interesting for reasons the organisers probably hadn’t intended. There were some extremely serious players — the kind who at some point decided professional sport wasn’t quite going to happen and pivoted into property instead and still have the physique — and some extremely non-serious players, and watching the collision of those two categories was unexpectedly entertaining. One winger ended up in a plastic chair on the sideline after a tackle and responded with a flurry of haymakers that suggested he had strong feelings about the situation. The crowd near us went very quiet for a moment and then resumed networking.

I had some good conversations, made some useful connections, and came away with two business cards from firms I’d been trying to get in front of for months. Networking as a concept I find slightly exhausting. Networking over warm Pimm’s while someone occasionally loses their temper about rugby is, it turns out, fine.

NFL at Wembley

Richard came home in September with two tickets to Jaguars v Colts at Wembley, obtained through a work contact, and I went along with the genuine curiosity of someone who has spent fifteen years in a country where rugby is a religion and has never meaningfully engaged with American football.

The game itself was secondary. The production was the thing. I have been to a lot of sporting events in my life and I have never experienced anything quite like the machinery of an NFL game day — the commercial breaks are actual breaks, the field fills with a marching band while the offensive and defensive units swap around, people on what I can only describe as pogo stilts do acrobatics along the sidelines, a cannon fires rolled t-shirts into the upper tier. It runs on a completely different logic to any sport I’ve watched before, and I spent a lot of it genuinely fascinated by the logistics of it. The food was aggressively American. The crowd was unexpectedly good-natured. Wembley, unusually for Wembley, was orderly.

I understood perhaps forty per cent of what happened on the field. I enjoyed myself completely.

Manchester. And Then, Eventually, Everything Else.

In early autumn, I went to a work event in Manchester.

I made a professional misjudgement. It involved a director. It was, by some margin, the worst professional decision I have made in my adult life, and I am not going to describe it here because describing it would not help anyone, including me. The directors were gracious the next morning. I was awake in my hotel room for most of the preceding night being quietly horrified at myself. I knew by breakfast that I was going to leave.

The question was what I was leaving for.

I had been, for several months before Manchester, quietly putting myself forward as a candidate for a project management role at an engineering consultancy who was looking for people to join their residential development  team. Not recruiting myself into the role — I was careful about that line — but having conversations, and doing interviews, and being honest with the relevant people about what I was and wasn’t. The boutique agency had done an enormous amount for me: market intelligence, client relationships, the matchmaking instinct I hadn’t known I had. But I’d always known it wasn’t the destination. Manchester simply clarified the timeline.

The week after I got back, I handed in my notice. My manager put me in a meeting room and told me I wasn’t leaving until I said where I was going. I tried to be vague. I am not very good at vague when I’m also slightly anxious and running on insufficient sleep, so I told her: project management, consultancy, residential development, we work with them. She exhaled, said “honestly, fair enough,” reminded me that I’d been good at it and should have charged myself a fee, and wished me well with what I thought was genuine warmth. I walked out into Mayfair at four in the afternoon and felt, for the second time in two years in London, the very specific lightness of a decision that should have been made earlier and finally has been.

I start in November.

Berlin, Late October

A long weekend in Berlin at the end of October, just the two of us, to decompress between jobs. Richard had a couple of days he needed to use and I had a gap between my last day at the agency and my start date, and we went somewhere we know is good when we need to think.

No agenda. The Bode Museum again because it’s always worth the Bode Museum. A long dinner in Mitte on the Saturday night where we talked about the next chapter with the slightly giddy seriousness of people who have been waiting for something and can finally see it clearly. A walk through Tiergarten on Sunday morning in the cold. Back Sunday night, ready.

I think that’s the word for where I am. Ready.

So: an eight-month update, roughly in order. Crete and Ibiza and the Sevens and the NFL and one very bad night in Manchester and then, eventually, the right door opening at the right time.

Next post will be about the new job. Which starts on Monday