Now this, dear friends, is me being extremely bad at business but extremely good at selling. Let’s face it, this was a terrible idea. People often say what a great businessman I am but there is nothing further from the truth. I am many things, but I am not, never have been and never will be a great businessman.
Although the management had an almost justifiable beef, there’s no way they should have deserted me in the first place, let alone been rewarded for doing so.
Indeed, when I foolishly tried a similar stunt a couple of years down the line, the whole episode ended up costing me £13 million and I didn’t work for the next three years.
But I must have been very convincing on the day because the board actually agreed to my suggestion, authorising me to dish out some new share options in the direction of my management team – if they deigned to return to work, that is.
I skipped off to the restaurant where they were waiting, happy to be the bearer of good news and confident they would see sense.
When I turned up they looked like three naughty schoolboys hoping to high heaven they weren’t going to get caned. If I’m totally honest, they looked like they thought they might be about to get fired. I suspect that they’d had time to reflect on their impetuousness and were perhaps beginning to think better of it. No need, though, for I only brought glad tidings of great joy.
‘You are all bonused up and back in business’, I declared to three visibly relieved and frankly somewhat surprised faces.
I only wish someone had been able to say the same to me later when, as I’ve said, I tried a similar stunt, but there I go, jumping the gun again.
Now, houses next and how to buy a really big one that you definitely can’t afford.
TOP 10 MUST HAVES WHEN I BUILT MY DREAM HOUSE
10 Helipad
9 Trout lake
8 Hot tub (wooden – outdoor)
7 Village shop in the kitchen
6 Library
5 Waterfall in the library
4 Identical replica of my local pub
3 Steam room
2 Cinema
1 Space
WITH THE ROCK-STAR LIFESTYLE COMES THE ROCK-STAR MANSION and all that goes with it. It’s all so unoriginal, I know, but nobody teaches you how to be rich and I fell for every cliché in the book.
I’d been looking for a place ‘out of town’, as they say, for a year or two and as the millennium was looming I still hadn’t seen anything that remotely took my fancy. Not for want of trying, I might add, as I spent most weekends viewing properties from the east coast of Kent all the way down to the sand dunes of Dorset.
If there was a big house with land for sale, I wanted to see it. I looked at castles, farms, lighthouses, windmills – I even looked at one place that had its own airstrip where the chap who owned it said I could have his Fokker thrown in for free!
So far, though, for one reason or another, nowhere had quite clicked. In fact it was getting to the point where I had just about exhausted all combinations of commutable counties and different types of dwellings therein. I needed something to happen to help me change my mindset, and it did, on a skiing holiday to Whistler in Canada, of all places.
This holiday was a freebie and, like most freebies, was probably more trouble than it was worth. After all who would travel several thousand miles to another continent for a skiing holiday that lasted just four days? Me and my old pal Johnny Boy Revell, that’s who. We were both from council estates and still hadn’t quite got over the fact that people were willing to give us stuff for free.
We almost felt like we had to go, despite the immense jetlag and the fact that by now we were both well off enough to pay for ourselves to go first class practically anywhere in the world. But a bargain was a bargain and so off we trotted deep into the snowy peaks of the Canadian Rockies.
Barely able to keep our eyes open when we arrived, we just about managed to hire a Chevrolet Silverado 4x4 pickup truck, throw our gear in the back and get on our way. We were soon to discover there are some things that can blow the cobwebs of jetlag clean out of the water.
Almost the second we hit the mountain road we became overwhelmed by what lay before us. In less than half an hour we were in a wilderness of calm and serenity, a world away from the hubbub of the tempestuous media rat race. There really was nothing but a blanket of white for as far as our tired eyes could see. Truly spellbinding.
As we continued on our way, we passed countless expanses of icy blue water, one of which was so breath-takingly beautiful we just had to stop, get out and stare at it for a few minutes.
As the wonder of the Rockies continued to astound, a newfound sense of peace slowly began washing over the pair of us but, where I was concerned, I could also feel a slight trace of anger beginning to gnaw at its heels.
‘Where is this anger coming from?’ I thought. ‘This isn’t right, I was about to be really content. Please leave me alone.’
But it wasn’t going anywhere. It wanted a word.
‘Why on earth haven’t you sorted out a house in the country back in the UK yet?’ it snorted. ‘You spend every weekend cooped up in your flat in London crawling from one ugly watering hole to the next when you could be out and about feeling the way you do now. You have the money, go get a life!’
I had to concede this anger had a point. I made a private deal with it to do two things when I returned back home.
1. I would buy a Chevrolet Silverado 4x4.
2. I would buy a house in the country within a month.
True to my word, I ordered the Chevy immediately upon my return, to be delivered on Christmas Day 1998. As for the house, I concluded that because I had looked at well over a hundred in the last year, at least one of which must have been suitable, it could only be reluctance on my part to commit to a big move out of the city that was the problem, rather than not having found a suitable property.
So here’s what I decided to do:
I would simply instruct an estate agent to take me to look at the five best houses currently for sale in the south-east of England, regardless of cost. After seeing all five, I would then undertake to buy the one that I liked the most, even if I didn’t really like it that much at all. This way I was forcing myself into a ‘yes’ situation.
I know this philosophy is a little extreme, especially for a boy who started life on a council estate with little more than his pocket money, his push bike and a paper round, but this is where I now found myself and I was determined to make the most of it.
There was more drastic action to come.
Because these houses were likely to be tens of miles apart, maybe even hundreds, it was going to be quite difficult to compare and contrast them. I therefore informed the agent to arrange all five viewings consecutively on one single day and to meet me that morning at Battersea heliport. I also kindly requested he seek permission from the vendors concerned for us to land in their gardens. We were about to have the viewing trip of a lifetime.
When we climbed up above Richmond Park on the Wednesday morning in question the rest of the world was at work. I don’t know who had to try the hardest to play it cool, the agent or myself. We were both grinning from ear to ear.
Extravagant as this strategy may seem, there was more than a grain of sanity in what we were doing. After all, we were dealing with houses worth several million pounds each, and if it took a one-day lease