Spare Parts, New Offices, and the Long Way Round

It’s late September. The window’s open in the sitting room and there’s that particular West Sussex evening air coming in — cold enough to need a jumper, still carrying something of a summer I barely remember having. A few months ago I was on a cliff path in Cornwall with wind in my hair and Sasha telling me I was circling. Now the plane tree outside is turning and the light goes at six and I’m forty, which I mention not for sympathy but because it’s sitting in the corner of this post whether I acknowledge it or not, so I may as well acknowledge it.

Nine months into forty. Still alive. So far, honestly, not that different to thirty-nine. Marginally more likely to choose the chair over the floor at parties. Slightly less patient with people who can’t make a decision in a meeting. Otherwise: fine.

It’s been a big year. I’ve changed jobs, been to four countries, had a professional experience so mortifying I’ve started to understand why certain memories apparently just… erase themselves, and watched my daughter go from a fifteen-year-old who found England mildly tolerable to one who actually seems to like it here. Not that she’d admit it in those exact words.

Here’s 2015 so far. In the order it happened.

The Forty Thing, Briefly

I turned forty on 9 April in a restaurant in Battersea that Richard had booked without telling me where we were going, which is either romantic or alarming depending on your disposition, and which I have come to accept is simply Richard. He’d got a table for eight — the two of us, Gemma, Immy and Miles, Serena and Kwame, and Julia, who arrived with a bottle of Barolo that I’m fairly sure cost more than my first month’s rent in Wellington. The food was excellent. There were speeches. Gemma gave one — typed up and printed out, which is very Gemma — that was funny and accurate and contained one detail about my early attempts to cook on the Henley Road villa’s ancient oven that I had hoped was lost to history.

What I noticed, sitting at that table: everyone in my life back in the UK has been in it for less than two years. Serena and Julia I met through work. Immy I’d known before New Zealand but we’d spent fifteen years in different time zones and had to rebuild from scratch. The people who’ve known me longest — Claire, Sasha, Tom, John, my parents — weren’t there because a restaurant in Battersea was too far from Horsham on a Thursday evening and logistics (and a lack of babysitters for Tom and John) defeated them. I had a perfectly lovely birthday and also, briefly, in the train on the way home, thought about the birthdays in Auckland where half the city seemed to show up and Richard had to actually manage the guestlist. Which is not a complaint. Just a thing I noticed.

Forty is fine. Forty is genuinely fine. I left England at twenty-three knowing essentially nothing, and I’ve come back at thirty-eight — turned forty — knowing considerably more, and the gap between those two things is the entirety of what I’d call my adult life. Most of it was in the Southern Hemisphere. I’m working out what to do with that.

Leaving CBRE

I should have known something was wrong when I started narrating my own commute home in the style of a David Attenborough documentary.

I’d actually joined CBs in August last year, but somewhere around month eight, between Bank and Waterloo on a Tuesday evening, I found myself thinking: “And here she is. The surveyor in her natural habitat. Returning to the watering hole. Carrying a laptop bag that is destroying her left shoulder and has been doing so for eight months and she still hasn’t done anything about it.”

The work wasn’t the problem. Commercial agency at a firm like CBRE is serious, properly serious — the transactions are significant, the clients are demanding, the people mostly know what they’re doing. The problem was that I kept being drawn toward the bits that weren’t my job: who was who in the client team, how they were coping with a lack of practical expertise in some technical disciplines, the discussions where real estate was not just about human capital as a metric, but about providing a culture and environment where people could thrive. I’d come back from a site visit feeling briefly alive. Then I’d come back to my desk and a pipeline report and feel the opposite of that.

Julia identified this at lunch in late spring. She put down her fork — Julia never talks with her fork in the air; she’s Swiss, it simply doesn’t happen — and said: “You’re good with people and you’re bored of the desk. I’m not sure commercial agency was ever right for you. I think you knew that when you took it.” Then she picked up her fork again and continued eating.

I had nothing to argue with, and after a brief conversation with Richard about a career pivot into recruitment, I decided to run with it.

I handed in my notice in May.

My line manager was gracious. More gracious than I deserved, given I’d been there less than a year, and she said the right things about open doors and good feedback and I believed her on all of it. I still left. The last day: laptop in a tote bag, Cheapside, June sunshine, the particular lightness of a decision that should have been made two months earlier and finally has been.

The thing that stayed with me, sitting on the Tube home: when I left Bayleys in Auckland, the whole floor came down to our viaduct local, Cowboys. There were speeches. Someone made a playlist. I cried in a completely undignified way that I have never once regretted. I got cards from clients. My director, who is not a man given to sentiment, hugged me for what felt like a very long time and said: “Don’t be a stranger.”

The CBRE exit was me, a tote bag, a lift to the ground floor, and the Strand at three in the afternoon.

Fifteen years of building a professional life somewhere, and then two years of starting again from scratch, is a very particular feeling. I’m not complaining about it. I’m just saying it’s a feeling.

The Mayfair Disaster

I interviewed, before the recruitment move, at an executive search firm in Mayfair. Panelled office, view over a private garden square, the very specific quality of quiet that comes from expensive carpet. The introduction had come through a contact from my Foxtons years — a former client, now in executive search, who’d offered to put my name forward as a professional courtesy. I’ll call him Patrick, because naming him in full would be unkind, and he has suffered enough from this situation without me adding to it.

The first interview went beautifully. I was on form. The managing director was sharp and the questions were good and I felt, walking out, that I’d done exactly what I’d gone in to do. Somewhere in the middle of it, she asked how well I knew Patrick.

Here is what I should have said: “We’ve met a handful of times professionally. He was kind enough to make the introduction.” Clear, honest, accurate.

Here is what I actually said, apparently propelled by some deep-brain instinct that social proximity signals professional credibility: “Oh, Patrick’s great. We go back quite a while.”

We do not go back quite a while. I have met Patrick three times. Two viewings and one industry drinks event where we spoke for fifteen minutes before he was absorbed by someone more important.

I have no idea where it came from. It arrived fully formed, as though a different, more confident, significantly less honest person had briefly inhabited my body and decided that this was the moment to perform familiarity. I walked out into Mayfair feeling good about myself. This was a tactical and moral error.

The second interview, a fortnight later. The managing director opened proceedings — before I’d properly sat down, before any coffee had materialised — by informing me that she’d spoken with Patrick since our first conversation, that his account of how well we knew each other didn’t quite match mine, and that she’d like to understand why there was a discrepancy.

Reader. I wanted to evaporate.

I did the only thing available, which was tell the truth in full: that I’d been nervous, that the statement had emerged from somewhere beneath conscious control, that I was genuinely mortified. She heard me out and — to her enormous credit — moved the interview forward. I did not get the role, which was the correct decision and I respect her for making it. I went home and lay on the bed staring at the ceiling for the better part of an hour.

Some months later I ran into Patrick at an industry event in Canary Wharf. I walked directly over — because the alternative was spending an entire evening actively avoiding a perfectly innocent man at a drinks party, and I am forty years old — and apologised, specifically, for what had happened. He looked at me with the polite blankness of a man who had filed this incident under ‘closed’ some time ago and was mildly surprised to find it being reopened at a networking event. He was very kind. We had a glass of wine. He asked after my work. I told him. We parted pleasantly.

I still think about it at least once a week. Occasionally twice.

The Boutique Agency

Mayfair. Eight consultants, two directors, Bond Street seven minutes away.  Recruiting specifically for Development and Project Managers.  My manager has a particular conviction that I have a complicated relationship with the telephone and repeats “pick up the phone” with a frequency that I have tracked mentally and which is, at last count, eleven times in a single working week. I do not have a complicated relationship with the telephone. I prefer email. These are not the same thing. We are managing our differences professionally.

What I wasn’t expecting: how much I’d actually enjoy the matchmaking part of it. Not the sales mechanics, not the targets, not the monthly commission review where everyone performs varying degrees of cheerful confidence about their pipeline. The actual matching — sitting across from a project manager who wants something more than what they’ve currently got, and knowing — because I’ve been in property marketing for fifteen years, because I know what a good team looks like, because I understand the difference between a firm with good people and a firm with good branding — exactly where they should go. That bit. I’m good at that bit.

First three placements: all women PMs. I am unreasonably pleased about this and will continue to be.

The commission is lumpy. This is the word everyone uses and it turns out it is precisely the right word. Some months are good. Some months you look at your bank statement with the particular expression of someone who knew this was going to happen and is annoyed at themselves for being surprised by it anyway. I’m told it evens out across a year. I’m watching carefully.

Cornwall with Sasha

Richard was in Frankfurt, and I'd asked Mum to look after Gemma for the long weekend. Sasha drove down over from Guildford for the May Bank holiday with a car full of good intentions and a bottle of something she’d opened “for the journey,” and we spent four days on the Penwith Peninsula in a stone cottage she’d found down a single-track lane with an Aga that I spent the entire first day negotiating.

The Aga and I reached an understanding by Saturday morning, which was when we walked the coast path from Porthcurno toward Land’s End, and then on Sunday from Sennen north toward Cape Cornwall, and both days were the kind of day that reminds you why you came back to this country in the first place. The light on the Atlantic in late afternoon. The specific grey-green the sea goes off Penwith that I have not found anywhere else. The cliff edge just there, and the whole empty ocean beyond it.

Sasha is going through the final stages of her divorce and is handling it with a pragmatism that I find both impressive and slightly exhausting to witness, because pragmatism on that scale requires constant maintenance. We talked about Greg and about the kids and about her role at Delancey, which is having a genuinely good year, and about my two years of professional wrong turns, which she summarised with the brisk accuracy of someone who’s known me since I was seven: “You’re not lost, Nicole. You’re just circling. You’ll know when you’re down.”

We also spent forty-five minutes of a cream tea in Sennen arguing about jam and cream order, which is my hill and I will die on it. Jam first. The cream is a condiment. It goes on last. Sasha maintains the opposite with the wrongheaded conviction of someone who has simply never applied critical thinking to this question. She is my oldest friend and she is wrong about this and has been wrong about it for decades and I have accepted that she will die wrong about it and that this is the price of the friendship, which is otherwise worth every penny.

Seven Sisters

The weekend after Cornwall, the three of us drove down to the South Downs for the Seven Sisters walk. It was Richard's idea, which I mention because it is unusual and should be noted. Gemma had just sat her last GCSE and was in the particular state of someone who has been running on adrenaline and revision timetables for six weeks and has abruptly had both taken away. The prescription, we decided, was a long walk in a large amount of wind.

The wind delivered. Seven Sisters on a June Saturday with a south-westerly coming off the Channel is not a gentle stroll - it's the kind of walk where you spend a meaningful amount of time leaning into something invisible and the photographs all have a slightly alarmed quality to them. The cliffs are extraordinary though. That particular chalky white against the grey-green sea, the Sussex Weald behind you, the path rolling up and over each headland in sequence. It's one of those landscapes that recalibrates your sense of what the word dramatic really means, and I grew up twenty minutes from here and had somehow managed to go fifteen years without coming back to it.

Gemma, who had been largely monosyllabic for the first hour in the way that sixteen-year-olds are monosyllabic when they haven't quite remembered how to be a person yet after extended exam stress, thawed somewhere around the third sister. By the fifth she was walking ahead, taking photographs on her phone with the serious focus of someone who has found an unexpected subject, and telling Richard things about the chalk geology that I'm fairly sure she'd retained from a geography lesson rather than looked up. Richard listened with genuine interest, which is one of the things he is consistently very good at.

We had lunch afterwards at the Tiger Inn, near Eastbourne - low beams, warm inside, the kind of pub that has been the correct post-walk destination for a very long time and knows it. I had something with chips. Richard had something with more chips. Gemma ate an alarming amount for someone her size and then said the walk had been "pretty good actually", which is the highest register of enthusiasm available from a sixteen-year-old who has been mildly dragooned into a family day out. I drove home with the particular contentment of a woman who has walked a long way in a large wind and eaten chips at the end of it. There are worse days.

Berlin Break

Richard had a conference in late June. I went with him, did exactly as I pleased for two days — the Bode Museum, the Hamburger Bahnhof, a great deal of purposeless walking, an unreasonable quantity of things from the Mauerpark market on the Sunday — and then on the third day Richard’s conference ended at lunch and we went to the Holocaust Memorial together.

I’m not going to try to write about the Holocaust Memorial properly. I don’t think I can and I don’t think it would be right. We walked through it mostly in silence and had dinner afterwards at a small Italian place near the hotel, and we talked the way you talk after a place like that — slowly, about the things that matter, about what you’re grateful for and whether you’re grateful for it loudly enough. Richard is very good at those evenings. He’s good at most things, actually. He’s just usually at a meeting.

Rugby World Cup

I had RWC hospitality through a contact from CBRE — a developer with more corporate allocation than he needed — and took Julia to England v Uruguay at Manchester City Stadium in October. Julia is not a rugby person. She is, however, an exceptionally good companion in any setting involving a structured itinerary and a serious lunch, and the Tom Kerridge menu was exactly serious enough. She ate everything with focused appreciation and asked me, at one point, whether rugby “always takes this long.” I told her only the slow games. She considered this for a moment and said she’d assumed they were all slow games. We let it go.

At home, the whole thing was operating on a different frequency.

Gemma watched every All Blacks match. Every single one. She’d come downstairs on match evenings in black from head to toe — she has an All Blacks jersey she’s had since she was twelve and it’s getting slightly small but she wears it regardless — and take up her position on the sofa with the focused preparedness of someone who has done their analysis and simply needs the game to confirm it. She has opinions about selection. She has opinions about set piece. She told me, before the France quarter-final, that she was “mildly concerned about the lineout” and then New Zealand won 62–13 and she said: “I still think it’s a concern.”

Richard watched with her. This was, strictly speaking, the quarter-final that was supposed to be happening in the background while he did something sensible, but the something sensible never materialised and I came downstairs at half time to find him fully committed to the sofa and the analysis with the slightly sheepish air of a man who’d been planning to do the accounts.

England went out in the pool stages. The street outside was very quiet that Saturday evening. The particular quiet of a country taking a moment. I said nothing. I am not entirely without mercy.

September

Gemma is in Year 11. She has friends now — proper ones, the kind that text at 11pm on school nights and require management of parental expectations about curfews — and in the summer she found a hockey club near home that doesn’t require her to explain herself or her accent or why she supports a rugby team most of the girls at school have never thought about. She’s in it. She’s properly in England now in a way she wasn’t when we arrived.

She still talks about Auckland. She still texts her Dio friends at hours that suggest nobody in the that timezone is aware that morning exists. She still, when she thinks I’m not watching, has the look of someone doing a private calculation about whether this is all going to work out. But she’s doing it from inside England now rather than from the outside looking at it with her arms folded.

I’m forty, and I was in the wrong job, and I’m making the most of things now that I’m in the right one.  That’s actually a reasonable position to be in, and my knowledge of all the various developers and consultancies involved in the delivery of projects across London is rapidly expanding every day.  I don’t have the entire route mapped yet but I know the destination, and knowing the destination is most of the work.

Sasha said I’m circling. She was right. But the circle is smaller than it was. I can feel it tightening.

The plane tree is turning. There’s something decent open in the kitchen. Richard is in the sitting room reading, which means the television is off and the flat is quiet in the good way. Gemma is upstairs. She’s either doing her GCSE coursework or watching Warriors highlights, and I’ve learned that the correct response to this ambiguity is not to ask.

It’s going to be all right.