You know the occupational hazard that most readers face at some point? You get the idea you can do it. No, really you can. After all, some fairy dust must have spilled off the pages. You know about plots and characters and story arcs. And your business letters always get a reaction. So you have a go.

This is a very early "go" of mine.

First jobs are like first kisses, moments that are crystallised forever. I read that once in a lifestyle magazine in a dentist’s waiting room and it has never left me; the notion that a job is as memorable as a kiss. Should n’t it depend though on who, or even how you’re kissing? Look at it like this: a kiss could be the innocent excitement of lips brushing timidly for the first time, or it could be the roiling and flailing of tongues. Then there is the sink of incisors deep into the jugular, which is a kiss too in some eyes. That’s the one I got from my first job. It reared behind me, I stumbled and it pounced. That image always came to me in the moments of my truest despair, still does even now when the blue mist swirls around.

I had blown down from the North, as soft and guileless as a rosebud, into the big City, burning with the belief that I wanted to write and that I would, whatever the conditions. The harder the circumstances then surely the better for a wannabe author like me. My letters were always entertaining and amusing, everyone said that, and I had been conducting a ribald, energetic correspondence with an American for several years. Thus in my estimation, the groundwork was already there; foundations, robust and solid. All I needed was time….and money. Grub Street is not Easy street; it costs, however frugal you may think yourself.

In the early years of the eighties before it went all go-go and even bricklayers decided it was not worthwhile to get out of bed for less than a grand, jobs were difficult to get. So I felt elated and I suppose oddly proud to get past all the hurdles and race past everyone else to land a position as a management trainee. It sounded glorious, certainly to a prestige hungry young man like me. In the wider scheme of things, however, being a fast-track management trainee with a minor fast food chain did not score highly then, nor, I imagine does it now. A job, though is a job. And would it matter anyway, since I was other directed, wanting to write, and did n’t every writer at some point in his or her life scrape bottom for a time. Paying your dues, that’s how I looked at it.
Wearing the blue trousers that I had been told to buy as part of my uniform, I walked through the side door of the head office restaurant to start four weeks in fast food boot camp. I was not alone; there were three others who had survived the culling process that passed as an interview. At the time it felt curiously heartening to know that only so few of us had made it this far. Did I need any clearer sign than we were the best of the best? Of course it only occurred years later to me that there was absolutely nothing even vaguely commendable whatsoever about this. The Will to Power would never be sublimated through a bacon cheeseburger?

The four weeks were intended to fit the four of us out to be competent and effective aspirant restaurant managers. To get us there, we went through the grinder. Up at the crack of dawn and back home with the night owls, day after day. Each day guided by a tutor, who felt himself to be indebted to the Marine school of instruction, we explored a different aspect of burger restaurant fundamentals. Some days we would be stuck in restaurant basement slicing onions or feeding thirty pound bags of steak mince into machines that would spit out four ounce hamburger patties. Other days were "theory days" when we would all pore over the aesthetics of the perfectly dressed hamburger: mayonnaise on the on the bottom of the bun to seal it, followed by ketchup, tomatoes, onion rings and a fine lettuce leaf to hold it all down. Or chew pencils in rapt contemplation over the notion of the Ideal Fry; should we always strive towards it? For all purpose use or just special occasions? Did it even exist?

All of this in preparation for the moment when we would be summoned upstairs to receive the thumbs up or down on our prowess as fast food restaurant managers. You had to be very bad, very, very bad, to get the latter hand signal. No one failed. The company could not allow it. Fast food eats people. Anyone who falls through the front door and can stay upright for eight hours is fodder for this machine. But, of course, we did not know this, and so the days before selection saw us reduced to teeth-grinding wrecks, more so than the physical demands of the job could ever drive us to. Each of us believed that no resits were possible if we did not pass muster. The goal, the Holy Grail in fact, for each one of us was to be sent to a central London restaurant. The West End, just the sound of it alone was intoxicating, was where we all wanted to be. The West End hummed, it buzzed, it sang. The focus too, for London’s stranger, odder, weirder inhabitants. It was also where the longest, hardest hours were put in. Still, if there is one way to find things out, then for so many of us it might as well be the hard way.

I was a writer. That was the delusion that I dined on daily and fed others whenever they asked what I was hoping from life. So I approached my job in the manner that I expected every other writer would, trying to become the all Seeing Eye. Everything and anything would be grist to my writing mill. A good and noble intention, which stayed in place for all of a month before I bowed and then broke, shattered by long hours. I did try, though, at least for a time to keep a diary going. It reads like something written by one of those fictitious Soviet worker heroes, boastful and indomitable, before rapidly sliding into the tone of the diary of the damned. I can excuse my blushing these days, after all I was only a kid, but did I really write: "I have anger in my soul. Something like Ahab’s fury. Only I have replaced anger with the will to succeed" Did someone hit me over the head with the grill spatula before I wrote that? They have to have done, if I was able to write this titbit: "I have fire and brimstone in my blood. I want to do well. I’m proud of my grillwork." Dear God, a child