— 1989 —

When I got back from travelling the world, I got a crappy job fixing electronics on planes at Heathrow and satellite communications on ships in French ports. The crappy job was crappy and I quit after three months with no idea what to do next.

Eventually, I narrowed it down to one of five things.

• I applied for a job on a millionaire’s yacht in Antibes in the Mediterranean.
• I applied for a job fixing satellite tracking equipment on Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
• I applied to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL) in Japan.
• I applied to do a degree in maths at Cambridge University.
• I applied to an adult education class in software engineering in the East End of London.

— 1990 —

I started my adult education class in software engineering in January but the instructor never showed up and most of my fellow students were only there so their unemployment benefits wouldn’t be stopped. Still, they gave me a computer and a copy of The C Programming Language and I taught myself.

The ticket to Antibes for an interview on that yacht arrived a few days later but I’d already made my choice.

Our classroom was next to the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel and we snuck out to play pool every afternoon. In one of the highlights of my pool-playing career, I got on the table at half past eleven in the morning and played undefeated — winner stays on — until the pub closed at eleven PM, even as the pub filled with gangsters.

Three months into my programming class, I got an interview with Total Systems on the City Road in Islington and I started work on Monday. Total Systems was a software consultancy and we did jobs all over London, big and small.

I was absolutely broke when I started that job. I walked miles to work in the City of London every day because I couldn’t afford the bus and I stuffed my shoes with newspaper to keep my feet dry. I could only afford to eat a couple of times a week but I knew the day would come when I was no longer broke and here I am, 35 years later, living in comfort with poverty a distant memory.

This is where it all began.

For my first job, they sent me on my own to fix a C program at Reuters. The program grabbed stock prices from around the world and uploaded it to a mainframe. The bloke who wrote the program didn’t really know C and the program kept crashing. I was the third person to try to fix it. Over the next few weeks, I kept fixing it and it kept crashing until one day I decided to just delete it and rewrite it from scratch. It never crashed again and I never told anyone what I had done.

My next job was a huge project designing a back-office system for financial traders at Shell on the South Bank. We were using a new programming language called Progress (my second favourite language) but everything else about the job was primitive and dysfunctional.

Instead of source control, we had a backup that ran every night. If you needed to go back to a previous version, you restored it from tape. To deploy the software, someone carried the tape to the production server and installed it.

The project went well though and I got promoted from trainee programmer to programmer then analyst programmer.

We were a fun bunch. Three pints in the Hole in the Wall every lunchtime and another five in the evening. Everyone drank stout and when it was your round, the order was eight pints of Guinness, three pints of Murphy’s and one pint of Beamish. The Hole in the Wall was one of those pubs where they took their stout pouring seriously and they would let it stand for a few minutes before they topped it off and drew a shamrock on top.

It was after one such night — after maybe too much Murphy’s — that I had one of my many close-to-death moments.

You know the long, shiny separators between the escalators that take you down to the underground trains? The ones with the Please Stand On The Left signs? Well, this was before the signs and there was nothing to stop drunken revellers from sliding all the way down. When I hit the sign at the bottom, I flew through the air and landed on my back on the metal escalator. I couldn’t walk.

Richard took me home and I had an escalator print on my back for weeks.

— 1992 —

My next gig was building a car insurance system out in Ilford. They had an ancient mainframe computer and we were replacing the whole thing — policies, documents, quotes, claims, accounting and statements — all in this new language, Progress.

It was a big team and, as the most junior member of the team, they had me building the data entry screens. I finished all that in just a couple of weeks and I asked for something meatier. They gave me the calculation engine that figures out premiums and it’s still one of the most complicated pieces of software I ever wrote. I finished it with no bugs and they promoted me to senior analyst programmer and made me the project leader.

The insurance system we built was such a success that we sold it to more insurance companies and it’s still for sale as Ultima thirty years later.

I had a lovely girlfriend at the time and we’d been back and forth to Malta for romantic encounters over the previous year but after a massive argument in September — where she threatened to set fire to my Billie Holiday albums — we parted and vowed never to speak to each other ever again.

A couple of days after Christmas, I was dancing on the tables at The Lord Rodney pub in Whitechapel with some old Navy friends. The DJ was playing Jackie Wilson Said and the girl on the table opposite was making eyes at me.

She was wearing a short, black dress and she was beautiful.

“I think you are in there, Kev!”, said Tony.

But I couldn’t do it and dreams of Maltese romance filled my head.

The next morning, I went to the travel agent and asked them to reserve a Wedding in Paradise for me. On New Year’s Eve, I called my ex-girlfriend in Malta and asked her to marry me.

“Yes!”, said Not-Yet-Mrs Clown.

I quit my job in London a few days later. The Managing Director of Total Systems had a self-imposed rule that he would never go to anyone’s leaving party but he came to mine.

— 1993 —

I had my final beer in The Three Johns at The Angel, Islington (the same pub where Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin planned the Russian Revolution) and we went off to get married in Jamaica.

When we got home, we went to live with my mother-in-law in Malta but that’s a story for next time.