Fragments 1996 - 2006

In 1996, I turned thirty. I’d long since stopped worrying about defining myself as someone who worked in IT as opposed to a singer in a band. A brief stint in the early 90s with a heavy metal band from Ulverston had put to bed any ambitions in that department although for a while I did some writing with a couple called Jeff and Teresa. We wrote a handful of great songs, which no one liked except us. 

Work was going very well for me – at this time I was on a contract as the senior analyst on a high profile project at the Bradford and Bingley – and I took a lot of delight in my daughters who, on my thirtieth birthday, were five, three and one. What I didn’t know was that there was another one on the way! But the satisfaction with work and the joy from my daughters didn’t do anything for the marriage, which was struggling. 

In May 1997 as New Labour swept to power, I moved out and took a job in London, coming home at weekends to see the girls. I was tremendously upset and emotionally lost. I shaved my head and thought about changing my signature; in retrospect, I think lost all sense of myself, who I was and what my values were. But I kept on going; working, seeing the kids, slowly recovering, and trying to see if there was some way of saving the marriage.

The other notable thing from this period was that my burgeoning interest in the Internet led to the formation of hobby company, Meantime, and I even acquired a client, The Roofbox Company. But that was another external interest when I should have been focussing on matters at home and in May 1999 I moved out for good, renting a house in Beetham*. By now I was working in Edinburgh for some of the week but I was always home at weekends and I had the girls two weekends in three, which was lovely.

And hard work! I remember once, lying on the sofa as the girls ate lunch, and falling asleep for twenty minutes. I woke up to the sound of them in the kitchen trying to sort out the washing up for me. They were (and remain) a lovely little gang and, despite everything, I have some very happy memories from that period, not least our weekly walk up to the Fairy Steps, where I would hide sweets or biscuits and say the fairies had left them.

A chance meeting with an IFA in 2000, when I lamented the chances of having my own house in the foreseeable future, let to him arranging a mortgage for me and the purchase of a house back in Kirkby Lonsdale for me and the girls. At least I thought it was just for us but when my girlfriend returned to Cape Town only to find she was pregnant, suddenly we found our family had grown. Nor had it finished growing. After Dan was born in 2002, Abi came along in 2004, the only one of my six children that was actually planned. 

In 2004, I was working on what would be my last contract. After finishing a job for JPMorgan in London, I was invited onto a project in New York. It was an unbelievable offer; work from home in England but travel out to New York for five days every few weeks. Meantime, the hobby company,  was still trucking along, though, and it was that summer when I was approached to do a major web-based IT project. It was a chance to get out of contracting and to work for myself and I seized it with both hands.

But although I had been running a limited company for thirteen years by this time, I had no proper experience of running a company. So, as we successfully delivered projects, I found that we weren’t making enough money to disguise our complete lack of working capital, a term which, tellingly, I hadn’t even heard when I was busy getting offices and employing people. By 2006, I was having sleepless nights and resorted to borrowing money and even remortgaging the house to pay the salaries on more than one occasion. Thankfully, the first person I employed, Steve Parker, turned out to be a staunch ally and together we worked our way through it, keeping our heads above water (which is one of the reasons he is my co-director now). 

It was a hectic ten years, with extreme highs and lows, but as I turned forty, I wondered if I’d really made the right decision in leaving contracting at a point when my career was at a high. Looking back - and considering I had mortgage and six children - it was always easy to doubt my decision to walk away from a job that paid very handsomely indeed. Yet I found myself on a path that I seemed determined to follow.

*This photo is of a statue that is inside a small stone building on the side of the road that goes up the hill out of Beetham. The girls and I would pass it on our way home and we'd always stop to say hello to "the lady".