This is where I broke soil and dug myself firmly into the world of work. My first place of salaried employment - Wendy's Restaurant, Cambridge Circus - in what seems now to be the dim, distant past of 1984.

The building has n't changed, other than the lurid fascia has gone, and the chief business is now Pizza Hut; Wendy's limped on for a few more years after I took this photo, until the US owners could stand it no longer and closed the UK arm down completely.

I saw the West End peering through those large plate glass windows; zonked clubbers and daintily dressed theatre goers, brawling football fans, call-girls being picked up, pickpockets rugby tackled by plain clothes police, people falling out of buses, the homeless trudging past.

And if I was n't peering, then I was without doubt panicking. Always something to over-rev my heart. No staff and we have to open in an hour! Where's the front door key? In the trash ! How come and why? The evening the back door was on fire and all the extinguishers empty.

Completely running out of all carbonated drinks on the hottest day of the summer: "...coffee? That's all you've got?... 'fraid so". A half eaten burger given to one customer and a stale bun to a visiting director, and both sold by me.

How did I survive? Somehow I did but I'll never understand why.

This was where I learnt how to think on my feet. My apprenticeship in expediency. Gruelling, but when I look back, oddly worthwhile.

Even though it was only 1984; the period of Boy George, the Joboxers, the Miners strike, the Limelight Club, slogan tee-shirts on the Frankie says theme. It still seems of a time before time.

I feel I took these photos when I lived in some remote antiquity.