Recruitment, Resignation, and the Eight Months I'm Glad I Survived

It is the first day of November and the trees in Clapham have decided, all at once and as one, that they are now ginger. I walked to Brickwood this morning under a canopy that’s gone the colour of a fox, ordered a flat white, sat by the window, and realised I haven’t written one of these in nearly six months. So this is going to be a long one. You may want a tea.

Since the last time I wrote, I have been to Cambridge in a Nissan Micra, Barcelona for my birthday, Manchester for a work weekend that I will not entirely recover from, the Mosel Valley with one of our friends in a state of post-redundancy collapse, Buckingham Palace for an actual garden party, Crete with Josh, Ibiza with most of my favourite people, and Berlin for Halloween. I have also resigned from my job. So if it feels like the year has accelerated lately — that’s because it has.

Cambridge in the Micra

In late March, the weekend after Easter, Josh and I decided to drive up to Cambridge for a day out. Josh has recently inherited his grandmother’s old Nissan Micra — she’s not driving anymore, the car had to go somewhere, and so it has come to live with us. It is, charitably, a small car.

Josh has many gifts. Driving is not, in my private opinion, among them. He has the specific habit of swivelling his head to look directly at me whenever he is making a point — which is fine in conversation and less fine when he is also doing 60 in a car the size of a fridge on country lanes I have never seen before. He also gesticulates. He has long limbs. The combination of long limbs, gesticulation, and a small car produces a driving style that I have started thinking of as kinetic.

We had a small argument about it. We had a slightly larger argument about it. We arrived in Cambridge mildly cross with each other but in one piece, ate ribs at a student restaurant that turned out to be excellent, walked the colleges, watched undergrads punting along the Cam with the focused incompetence of people who think they know what they’re doing, and were back in the car by late afternoon for the cross-mood drive home. The argument never really resolved itself. The day was lovely anyway. This is, I am increasingly noticing, the texture of being two and a half years into a relationship.

I will say one thing in his defence. In New Zealand, I drove. It was my car and they were my roads and I was the cautious one. He has now had to do all the driving in this country for three years. The least I can do is occasionally not flinch.

29

For my 29th birthday, Josh surprised me with three days in Barcelona. I’m not sure I’ve ever loved a city more on a first visit. The grid plan — those long, deliberate avenues with their pocket plazas tucked between the lanes, like the city built itself little green resting points — is the work of someone who actually thought about how a person would walk through their day. The wrought iron on the streetlamps is a level of finish I cannot stop noticing. It’s the kind of city where you keep looking up.

We did Park Güell, which somehow lived up to the photographs — that mosaic dragon, the bench that curls around itself like a sentence, the view back over the city in the direction of the sea. We did Casa Batlló at night, all lit up against the dark, which is, I think, how Gaudí is supposed to be seen — at scale, glowing, not jostled past on a Tuesday afternoon. We did the outside of the Sagrada Familia. We did not do the inside of either Casa Batlló or Sagrada Familia, because the queues were the queues, and I am not yet a person who is willing to lose two hours of holiday to a queue. Maybe at thirty.

Josh had quietly briefed himself on the food. The first night was a tiny tapas place near the hotel — anchovies, padrón peppers, sangria so cold it hurt my teeth in the best way. I had my first glass of kalimotxo at his recommendation, which is red wine and Coke, and which apparently a generation of Spanish punks consumed by the bucket. I will admit, with no malice, that it is not for me. There is something about sweet-and-tannic together that my palate refuses to accept as a category. But I drank one for the experience and we had a good laugh about it.

He also booked us into a beautiful seafood place near the hotel for my actual birthday dinner — white tablecloths, a candle, gambas that arrived with their faces on. Twenty-nine on the cusp of thirty, in a city I’d never been to, with my person, eating prawns the size of my hand. I was very happy.

Manchester — A Night I Will Not Be Writing About

A few weeks after Barcelona, I went to Manchester for a Capstone work night out. There was a steak. There was a club. There was a mid-evening at which I was reasonably in command of myself, and a late evening at which I was not.

I made the worst professional misjudgement of my career on that night out, in front of one of the company Directors. I am not going to write it out here. I will only say that what I did was unwise; that he handled it with a great deal more grace than I deserved; that I excused myself from the rest of the evening; that I lay in my hotel room for several hours, dressed, on top of the covers, in a state I’m going to describe as acutely awake; that I slept for about ninety minutes; and that the next morning I sat down at breakfast with the other Founders, who took the piss out of me with a speed and accuracy I would have appreciated more in slightly different circumstances.

Their actual line — which I remember word for word — was that worse things have happened, and that I shouldn’t worry. Which is, on reflection, exactly the level of moral guidance you would expect from people who run a recruitment business in the City. They were kind to me. I did not feel kind to me.

I would say it was the moment I knew I was leaving recruitment, except I think I had known for a while and just hadn’t admitted it yet. Manchester was the moment the knowing surfaced.

Mosel Valley

Bank holiday weekend at the start of May, a group of us went out to the Mosel Valley in Germany for a long weekend of wine. I’d done the Rhine on the Contiki in 2013 — I’d brought Josh back a bottle of Eiswein in a little cherrywood box — and I had decided, on the basis of nothing whatsoever, that I had a thing for German wine.

The trip almost immediately produced a story. Josh and I were on the same flight as a friend of ours, Shea — and we had no idea he was on it until we got off the plane and saw him standing at the carousel, looking like a man who had recently been described, in a deathbed pamphlet, as “wiry.” Shea had been made redundant from his job seventy-two hours earlier and had spent the intervening time on a strict regimen of beer, certain other indulgences, and watching old NBA finals games starting from the year 2000 forward. He was, by any measure, a wreck. He had also somehow forgotten to mention to anyone that he was coming on the trip.

We took him in. We took him out for dinner. We did the group’s weekend supermarket shop. We all went to bed.

In the morning we found that Shea had eaten, by my fairly conservative estimate, three hundred euros’ worth of food. Not snacks. The shop. I am still not sure when he did it. He looked considerably better the next day. The rest of us looked considerably worse. We forgave him in stages over the course of the weekend, mainly because he is genuinely lovely, and partly because there is nothing else you can do when a friend has eaten all the cheese.

We stayed in Cochem, which has a fairy-tale fort on the hill above it (the Reichsburg) that you can climb up to and that I would recommend if you are wearing the correct shoes. We did the Trier Cathedral, which would have been impressive if the weather hadn’t done its best to defeat us — we spent most of that morning under hoods. And we did Burg Eltz, an actual storybook castle in a forest valley, which has somehow survived eight centuries with all of its turrets and pointed roofs intact, and which is — I will say this baldly — one of the most beautiful single buildings I have ever stood in front of. There was a meal in Koblenz at a converted church that did the thing where the lighting alone makes you behave better. There was a lot of Riesling. The wine, I will tell you, deserved its reputation.

We had also, on this trip, brought along a couple — Wes, who is a friend of Josh’s, and his girlfriend Bianca. Bianca worked at Deloitte and was extremely sure that this entitled her to certain views. By the second evening, Josh and I had started exchanging the small specific looks that long-term couples exchange when a third party is making a particular kind of speech. By the Sunday, we were ready to go home. I think she’s lovely, in a parallel universe. Just not this one. Just not this trip.

Buckingham Palace — A Spot of Tea at Liz’s Place

In May, Josh and I had genuinely the most surreal afternoon of our London life so far.

Kurt had mentioned, a few weeks earlier, that there’s a lottery for Kiwis to attend one of the summer Buckingham Palace garden parties — the Royal Family does a series of them across the season, and apparently a slot is set aside for Commonwealth citizens. We applied without expecting much. We won. We turned up at the Palace gates on a Tuesday afternoon in our best polite clothes, slightly pink with embarrassment about how exciting we found the whole thing, and were ushered into the grounds along with several thousand other people who had also decided to look polite for the day.

It drizzled — of course it drizzled — but mostly held off, and the gardens were the sort of immaculate that only happens when several dozen full-time gardeners have been at it for a hundred and fifty years. There were small marquees serving tea and sandwiches. There was a string section. There were people in hats so spectacular that they had clearly been built for this exact occasion and would never be deployed again.

And then the Queen came out.

We got to within about five metres of her — close enough to see, properly, her face, which was extraordinary — and she was wearing a pink coat and a matching hat. At ninety, she looked like a woman who has had a great deal of practice at standing in gardens being looked at, and was still managing to enjoy it. I’m not a monarchist by training, but I will admit the moment was a moment.

We can both, formally, now say that we have had a spot of tea at Liz’s place. I will be working that into conversations for the rest of my natural life.

Surveyors 7s — Networking, with Rugby in the Background

A couple of days after the garden party, the property industry’s annual Surveyors 7s tournament at Richmond Rugby Club — which is, on paper, a rugby tournament, and is, in practice, the year’s biggest property industry networking event.

I will say this for the Surveyors 7s. There was rugby. The rugby was, on the field, of an extremely variable standard — many of the property industry teams are full of casual ring-ins who are quickly discovering, by virtue of being smashed in half, that they are not, in fact, professional rugby players. The Stirling Akroyd team had a winger who at one point lost his composure and threw several extremely committed haymakers at his opposite number after being shoulder-checked into a row of plastic chairs on the sideline. Genuine combat. The crowd, almost to a person, did not look up from their pints.

That is the funny thing about Surveyors 7s. Almost no one is there to watch the rugby. The whole event is a pretext for getting the property industry into one place, in pleasant weather, with a bar tab and the implicit social licence to talk to anyone who happens to be standing near you. And as a Kiwi who came to this country largely because of rugby, watching a thousand surveyors ignore an actual game was — and I say this with affection — a bit much.

The semi-final was excellent. The winger from Stirling Akroyd did not start it.

Crete

In August, Josh and I had a proper Mediterranean week. We flew into Heraklion and drove out to a small town on the north coast called Rethimno — old fort town, narrow streets, a Venetian harbour, the right number of restaurants, the right amount of rough edges. It was the first holiday Josh and I had taken just-the-two-of-us since Barcelona, and we were due one.

I do not have a UK driving licence. My Kiwi one expired in 2014 — a fact I keep not getting around to addressing, in the way you keep not getting around to dentist appointments. So Josh drove. Of course Josh drove. And of course, somewhere on the road between Rethimno and Balos, we had The Driving Conversation again. I will say no more.

The week itself was glorious. Long lunches at seaside tavernas — gigantes, octopus, those tomatoes that taste the way tomatoes are supposed to taste and never do in England. Sunsets on the harbour wall. One slightly chaotic moped ride up to a hilltop village that had a single café and the best lemon cake of my life.

We did two beaches. Elafonissi is the famous one — pink sand, turquoise water, the sort of beach that gets featured in every Greek-island listicle on the internet. It was, regrettably, the worst beach experience of my life. The crowds were biblical. The “pink sand” turned out to be more of a coarse, sharp shaley substance that does not feel pink underfoot — it feels like what would happen if someone ground up a paving slab and called it a holiday. Within forty minutes we’d packed up and driven the long road back across the island to Balos, which I will now defend with my last breath.

You park up at the top of a cliff. The car park is dusty and underwhelming. You walk down a long set of steps cut into the rockface — there are donkeys for the people who would rather not — and the path is lined with low, parched plants the colour of paprika. And then you turn a corner and the sea opens up below you, and it is the most absurd shade of blue I have ever seen in actual life, with a long shallow spit reaching out toward an island offshore. The water is so warm that walking into it is like walking into a bath. The sand is fine. The orange shrub-cliffs frame it like a painting. It reminded me, faintly, of Cathedral Cove — but bigger, hotter, more.

It was 40 degrees the day we went. I drank water like it was a religion. We stayed until our skin had gone past gold and into honey, and then we drove back to Rethimno and ate an enormous Greek dinner and went to bed.

Ibiza — Eight Days, Fifteen Kiwis, One Heatstroke

The last week of August / first week of September I had Capstone client drinks at Madisons in St Pauls, and at some point, somewhere between the fourth and fifth glass of warm white wine, I knew. I don’t know how to describe knowing better than that. I just knew. I couldn’t do another year of this. The wining and the dining and the schmoozing and the throwing-enough-shit-at-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks. The credit card permanently in the red. The commission cycles. The Friday nights when I had to keep going. I was done.

The next day I flew to Ibiza.

Eight days. Fifteen Kiwis. One absolute madness of a holiday. I had done Ibiza once before — a long weekend with a smaller group of girls a few years back — and I had thought I knew what Ibiza was. I had not, it turns out, known what Ibiza was.

We started in Sant Antoni for the first night, which was a tactical decision — Michelle and Dani had local errands to run, of the sort I am not going to describe in writing — and then moved out to a villa in Sant Josep de sa Talaia for the rest of the week. The villa was huge. There were enough bedrooms. There was a pool. There was a supermarket within walking distance, which became the lifeline of the trip — fresh fruit, vegetables, mixers, snacks, the occasional joint of meat for the days we managed to remember dinner. You learn quickly, on a trip like this, that the body does what the body needs.

Michelle had, in the four months before we flew, gymmed her way into the kind of physical condition that gets noticed at airports. Low body fat. Genuinely visible abs. The whole production. She arrived at the villa looking like an advertisement for HIIT and protein. She lasted, honestly, about seventy-two hours before reverting, like the rest of us, to the median Kiwi physique. The body, again, does what it needs to do.

The week was: Chase & Status at Amnesia. Craig David at Ibiza Rocks. Tinie Tempah at Ushuaïa. Long hot days by the pool with sangria that was almost certainly mostly red wine. Long hot nights at clubs that did not get going until 1am. Five o’clock arrivals home, six o’clock falling asleep, seven thirty being woken up by the ones who hadn’t gone as hard.

I had, on one specific afternoon, an absolute serotonin crash that I can now identify as heatstroke. I had spent the day in the pool drinking sangria in direct sun without water, which is the cocktail equivalent of standing under a heat lamp with a hairdryer. I was useless by 6pm. The rest of the group went out to Pacha that night, which turned out to be the night Pacha was running their Flower Power night — the long-running Ibiza institution that goes back to the seventies, all disco and Motown and freewheeling hippie fancy dress. The crew apparently did their best to vibe with it but couldn’t quite, in their own words, find the form. I lay in the villa with cold flannels and the worst FOMO of my year. The next morning, when the others described what Flower Power had actually been, my FOMO evaporated approximately within the first sentence.

The trip’s other unforgettable cast member was Bobby, who had joined the group last and consequently slept on the couch in the main lounge. Bobby was the only person in the villa who was getting woken up at 7:30 every morning by whoever hadn’t gone hard the night before. By the end of the trip, Bobby was running on something like nine hours of sleep across eight days. How he survived is a medical question.

When he got back to London, depleted in every measurable way and probably a few unmeasurable ones, he tried to perk himself up by going for a walk on Clapham Common. He sat on a bench. He watched a small girl playing with her beagle, and the beagle making friends with another dog, and Bobby — at this point a man who had not had a proper sleep in eight days, was running entirely on residual chemicals, and had no functional emotional regulation left in his body — Bobby promptly began to weep. Real tears. Fully sat on a bench, on the Common, weeping at a beagle. He told me about it three days later, completely deadpan, and I have not stopped laughing about it since.

Some financial highlights, for the record:

• €48 for two Red Bull and vodkas

• €7 for 250ml of bottled water (no free water anywhere unless it was hot or salty)

• And a general financial recklessness that my credit card is still digesting

But I don’t regret a minute of it. Eight days that I will be telling stories about for the rest of my life.

The Resignation

Now. Here is the bit I have been most looking forward to writing.

In the weeks before Ibiza, I had been working on a recruitment brief for Arcadis — they had a very strong project management team doing real residential development work, which is, as anyone who has been reading this for any length of time knows, what I have always actually wanted to do. I had been interviewing PMs to put forward to them. And at some point during the brief, I had thought — wait. Hold on. I am also a PM. I am sitting on the wrong side of this table.

So I put myself forward as a candidate. I had two interviews before Ibiza. They liked me. I liked them.

When I got back from Ibiza — a state I will describe as technically functional — I had an offer. I accepted it on the spot, without negotiating, because I am bad at negotiation and also because I just wanted out. I then sat at my desk for about forty minutes trying to work out, in the immediate post-Ibiza fog, what my notice period actually was. I gave up. I wrote my resignation letter. I handed it in.

My Manager intercepted me before the letter had finished cooling. He marched me into a meeting room. He said I wasn’t allowed to leave the room until I told him where I was going. I tried to be smart. I said it wasn’t to a competitor — which was true, it was a client — and that anyway, the firm had let people go before with no notice and paid them out, so what was the point in keeping me on commission if I clearly didn’t want to be there. He was unmoved. I tried to be smarter. I failed.

I was, by this point, slightly sweating, jittery in a way that was probably not entirely the conversation, and I cracked. I told him — Arcadis. I’m going to Arcadis. Going back to PM work. Doing residential.

He sat back. There was a long pause. Then he exhaled, all at once, and the whole shape of the conversation changed. He understood. He shook his head, a little ruefully, and pointed out — politely, but accurately — that I had failed to negotiate myself a recruitment fee for placing myself, which would have been considerable. He asked, without pressing, that I not say too much in future about the actual mechanics of the recruitment industry as I had seen it from the inside. That is a request I am happy to honour. The less said the better.

And then I was out. I had two more weeks on the books. The new role started in early November.

It is genuinely the most relieved I have felt about a professional decision since I left Cube two and a bit years ago. Some doors you walk through; this one I sprinted through in stockinged feet without looking back.

Odds & Ends

Sunday 2 October — the Jaguars v Colts at Wembley. A friend got us tickets to the NFL London game and it was one of the more surreal sporting events I have ever attended. American football is, in person, half sport and half infomercial — the breaks are constant and they are fully programmed. There are marching bands that come onto the pitch between possessions. There are people running full backflips up the field on those bouncy stilt-leg things. There are t-shirt cannons firing into the crowd. The food is gloriously un-British — hot dogs the size of forearms, donuts the size of side plates, beer in cans the size of vases. I had a great day. Wembley, weirdly, ran better than it ever does for a domestic football match — I can only assume the Americans bring some of their organisation with them.

Halloween in Berlin. Last weekend, a big group of us flew to Berlin for the city’s Halloween, which is taken extremely seriously and has at least one venue per neighbourhood doing some form of haunted experience. We stayed in Mitte. We drank far too much. I had the genuine living daylights frightened out of me by costumed performers playing ghosts and axe murderers in alleyways I had been promised were safe. I screamed several times in front of people I work with socially. I do not regret it. It was, in the German-Halloween sense, magnificent.

And so

Eight months. Not all of them survived gracefully. But survived. The trees outside are ginger, I have a new job that starts in three days, my credit card is finally heading in the right direction, and Josh is making something that smells of garlic in the kitchen.

That’s enough writing for one Tuesday morning.

Katie x