When first attempting to find my way in the world as a writer I flirted with the idea that I should try to get a full-time post on a national paper or magazine.
An enterprising national journalist, who had taken on some public relations writing commissions for a Middle Eastern country, had found himself overloaded with work and hired me as a subcontractor. This was in the mid-seventies when cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi were little more than immense building sites and the rest of the world was only just waking up to the fact that the people who lived there had become the richest on the planet, due to the revenues that were springing from their oil wells, and were going to be building entirely new and extraordinary metropolises where recently there had been little more than fishing villages.
Needing to pick up some papers from him I went to his office one day in Fleet Street and he introduced me to his surrounding colleagues. The atmosphere had all the noise, bustle and excitement that newspaper offices in Hollywood movies manage to reproduce and for a moment I wondered if this was where I should really be. The wide-eyed wonder with which I was looking around must have been obvious.
‘So,’ one of the journalists asked as he waited with a phone clamped to his ear for someone to pick up at the other end, ‘are you hoping to get into a place like this, or are you just an opportunist freelance hack?’
The person at the other end of the line obviously picked up because he didn’t wait for my answer, introducing himself and saying where he was calling from. The other person hung up.
Someone senior to the people I was sitting amongst burst into the room, hurling expletive-laden abuse in all directions. None of them seemed to be particularly bothered but all I could think was that I wanted to get back out into the fresh air and freedom of the street.
Walking home along Fleet Street I decided that I would stay on the outside a little longer, as far as possible from people who thought screaming abuse was a satisfactory way to pass the day and nowhere near anyone who was likely to hang up the phone as soon as they heard who I was.