By day I had a few jobs making conversation in English with Japanese businessmen so they could polish up their language skills. I lived well enough, sharing a flat with another girl, but after about seven months I felt it was time to go. The wanderlust took over and it was off again, this time to Hong Kong.
I arrived to find that Uncle Tony wasn’t there any more, but on my very first night I went to the bar of a hotel where I planned to stay and there was Chris, the English singer I’d met in Oslo. I stayed with him and his wife while I looked for a job and found my feet.
A girl called Jane, who had been working with my uncle Tony before he left Hong Kong, helped me find a job. While looking though her photo album after dinner one night, I was stunned to see a photo of my ex-flatmate Joss, with whom I’d lived for a while. We compared notes and realised I had taken Jane’s old room when I moved in with Joss.
I did a couple of different jobs in Hong Kong. Jane introduced me to an ad agency based in the building where she worked, and I started working for them selling corporate sponsorship for a road-safety project called Constable Care. I had more time (and enthusiasm) than anyone else in the company, so ended up running it. Because of the experience I gained there of bringing together the Government Information Services (GIS), the police, army, kids with corporate sponsors and the media, I ended up helping Ogilvy & Mather PR set up and run the Keep Hong Kong Clean campaign. (The first taught me the power of the media, the second to deal with failure.)
When I’d got myself settled, Vera came over to join me from Oslo and she moved into my flat for a few months. She was now studying sociology and managed to get a grant. We figured that living in Hong Kong and reading her textbooks would probably be good study. The exchange rate and difference in the cost of living meant she could get by in Hong Kong for the academic year.
It was a brilliant place to live, with 24-hour music and parties. It was obsessed with money and hedonism, probably a bit like the City in London but with a better climate.
I lived in Hong Kong from 1988 to the end of 1990, and I was there when the students protested in Tiananmen Square and Chinese troops opened fire on them. Information wasn’t getting through to the Chinese public, who didn’t have access to Western media, so the South China Morning Post printed cut-out A4 pages explaining the situation and anyone who could faxed them to contacts on the mainland. The massacre caused consternation in Hong Kong because the 1997 handover had already been arranged and was fast approaching and locals were worried that this might be the way they would be treated under Chinese rule.
Meanwhile, back home, Mum’s health had been deteriorating over the years and she was now finding it difficult to look after herself. She was overweight, and that probably contributed to her lack of mobility, but it was also the reason why she wouldn’t ever consult doctors. ‘They’ll only tell me to lose weight,’ she complained, and I’m sure she was right. Unfortunately it meant that her diabetes was never diagnosed. Uncle Frank, the husband of Mum’s sister Beryl, was diabetic, so Mum would clip recipes out of magazines that would be suitable for him, while still eating sugary foods herself. She didn’t complain much about her health, but she needed someone to help her with shopping and housework and anything that required much energy. Carolyn had been doing it for years, and I now felt it was time I helped.
I flew back from 25° sunshine to cold, grey, rainy Bradford, a city I’d never lived in before and where I knew no one apart from Mum and Carolyn. I got a job in Leeds with a recruitment agency, Michael Page. I initially went to ask them to find me a job, but they laughed and offered me a job with them instead. I bought a house near Mum’s, a tall, narrow terrace on a steep hill. Mum was happy to have me at home, and I was happy to be able to spend time with her. I was nearly 27 years old and had had more than a dozen careers to date, so maybe it was time for me to settle down just a bit.
I really enjoyed getting close to Mum again, but we were to have limited time together because in 1992, just over a year after I came back to Britain, she died very suddenly. The shock left me reeling for the next couple of years. I couldn’t decide what to do with myself any more. I felt unbalanced, like a tree without roots or a house without foundations.
Dad came back and took a job in Cheltenham. I took a marketing job in Redditch, near Birmingham, and was able to live with him during the week and drive back to Bradford at weekends. The work was fine at first, but I soon got frustrated. When you keep changing profession, as I did, you never get a chance to work your way up to the interesting jobs at the top. No one’s going to offer you a massive new opportunity when you have a track record like mine. Some people stay with the same employer for decades and climb the ladder – my brother worked for the BBC for over twenty years – but it wasn’t in my nature to put my head down and work. So when Mildred rang and invited me out to Singapore in September 1994, I was ready to change jobs, homes, continents, everything.
Within a week of arriving, Mildred had introduced me to Peter and I’d got the job with Adventure Travel, a company that offered adrenaline-fuelled package breaks to expats living throughout the Far East. They needed someone who knew where the apostrophes should go and I persuaded them that punctuation was my specialist subject.
The job was like a dream come true for me, especially when Peter said he’d like me to go and check out some of the sporting activities and write copy myself – except that my MS diagnosis came only a few months after I’d started. Would I still be able to do all the things they needed me to? I was utterly determined that nothing would stand between me and my newfound love of scuba-diving, so in April 1995, soon after I returned to Singapore, I went to review an Indonesian dive site.
I could still swim and breathe in the mask, so I didn’t think there would be a problem. After a dive one day, though, I swam to the shore and was walking up the beach when I looked down and saw I’d left a trail of bloody footprints all the way up the sand. My feet had been cut to ribbons on the sharp coral and I hadn’t felt a thing. That was a bit of a shock. I was going to have to take a little more care of myself.
Peter sent me on a number of other trips: white-water rafting down rapids on the edge of a jungle in Borneo and more scuba-diving, but I learned to keep an eye on my legs because I couldn’t trust that I was feeling sensations in them accurately. They weren’t responding the way I’d been used to. I never thought I’d be doing this job for too long, but I’d figured a bit longer than this.
Writing about music gave me the chance to meet and interview lots of fascinating people, and gave me free access to Singapore’s buzzing music scene, but the late nights were becoming harder to cope with (even before my MS diagnosis).
My next job – one I’m still doing today, albeit a bit differently – was managing Omar. It’s not something I actively chose in the beginning, but I was living with a houseful of musicians. Their talent lay in making music and mine lay in organisation, so we all just did what we could. They also each did what they could to make my life easier (except getting places on time).
It was incredible luck that I met Omar and the Cuban Boys when I did. The timing was impeccable. They needed managing and they met me, and I became friends with a bunch of people who were able to make me laugh at things that would otherwise have made me cry. It was through them that I worked out how to deal with the disease. Because of them, I was able to take my neurologist’s advice and get on with everything I wanted to do for as long as I could.
The house where the Cuban Boys were living in Singapore had five bedrooms to accommodate the ten of them. Omar had been sharing a room with Mariano, the bass player. After I moved in, Mariano would stay elsewhere whenever he could to give Omar and me some space. No one seemed to mind my arrival. It was a very easy place to live. We took it in turns to shop and clean up and cook, although there was only really breakfast to worry about because the band could eat dinner at a restaurant owned by Fabrice (as per their contract) and there really wasn’t time between getting up and dinner to think about lunch.
Omar