What Was I Thinking: A Memoir by Paul Henry Page A

most far-flung, most isolated parts of England and we just talk to the people that live and work there.’ There was a little bit more to it but essentially that was the guts of it. It was no surprise to me at all that this producer came back to me after a week and said he liked my idea.
    ‘Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll give you an office and a secretary, and you do the production. You turn it into something that we can then turn around and do.’
    So for a while I had an office. I had visions of myself getting plants from the nursery and furnishing the thing and then mail people would come around and I’d be this mysterious character tippy-tapping away or dictating. The best thing about it, as far as I was concerned, was that someone would be delivering me mail. Stationery has always been an enthusiasm and I got a stamp made with my full name on it — Paul Henry Hopes — so that I could stamp any documents I thought needed it.
    Of course, I never got around to making the programme. As with so many of my ambitions, I was much more interested in getting the gig than in doing it. Also, it didn’t pay any money, which was one of the reasons the producer had been so happy to let me do it, but it was a big disincentive as far as I was concerned. It was just going to be too hard. It was also going to take too long; my attention span was waning.
    I was after something that was going to get me a job, not something that was going to become a job, possibly, at some stage. I still didn’t have a proper BBC job that I could live on and that would help improve things for my mother and myself. I liked the excitement and variety of what I was doing, but at the same time we were very poor and my mother was working very hard. The flip side of my taste for variety was a craving for security. In my life up till now there had been a lot of insecurity, so I wanted permanence in things, which at that time meant getting an actual job. Just not in the tobacco factory.
    Also, England was even more depressing this time around. When I first went there it hadn’t been so noticeable, because I was only 11 years old and didn’t have a choice. But when I went back, my mother was still in the same council flat and everyone else I knew was still doing exactly what they had always done.
    I decided to move back to New Zealand again — and if you’re finding this a little repetitive, I promise this is the last time I will change countries. At least I had made my mind up before I turned 21.
     
    So I moved back to Auckland, determined not to waste any more time dithering about what I was going to do. I wanted to establish security and amass wealth, start businesses, get a decent job in radio. Probably not in that order. At the same time, predictably and in between finishing one thing and starting another, I added a few glittering lines to my CV.
    I got a job selling coffee machines and quite quickly became the manager for my region — a deliberate move to divert attention from the fact I wasn’t any good at selling the machines.
    ‘I’m going to be found out,’ I thought. ‘I’ve got to become branch manager or they’ll realise I’m hopeless. They better promote me quick.’
    One of the reps was Dutch and everyone else there hated him. I couldn’t work out why. I thought it might have been because he had a beard, or because he had an accent or just because he was Dutch.
    Eventually I realised it was because he was so spectacularly successful. Also, he didn’t like any of them, either. He didn’t want to go to meetings or chat about the weekend or drink with them after work. His pockets were full of slips of paper with leads. All he cared about was leads and possibilities. Why would he come in for a meeting when he could be out there selling coffee machines? Somehow he ended up showing me how to sell the machines and he would have been a good teacher if I had been a better student. The only time he wasn’t talking about selling coffee