Legally trained ex art director poet seeks work as photographer part i

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AMBITIONS
I guess it’s because I’m a Libran. You know scales, indecisiveness and all that. I mean how many careers can one person want in one lifetime.

I didn’t start out with any great ambitions nor have I really acquired any along the way. My principal aim once I'd left school was to be a clerical assistant in the civil service. Wow! that's some ambition. But you needed O’level English for that… which I didn’t have in the required grade. Got a Grade A in History mind but who gave a fig. This was Peterborough in Maggie Thatcher's Britain. There were zillions unemployed and I had to accept that a solitary history O’level (grade A or not) wasn’t going to push me to the front of too many job queues.


PROPER JOB & NEPOTISM
So, it was youth training schemes for me, and I guess I hit the jackpot when one of them morphed into a ‘proper’ job. It was at a secondary school as reprographics assistant to Jerome, a French hippie genius. It was he who gave me my first camera (a broken Praktica Super TL) and it was he who helped me to publish my first booklet of poetry. Hi I’m Erroll who the hell are you?

When Jerome left to take up a teaching post he was replaced by ‘nice guy Nick’ whom I recall was married to one of the teachers, which is very helpful if you're applying for a job you know nothing about and Nick knew nothing at all about the job he was hired to do. Guess which lowly paid fool had to train him. Now I’ve never had a problem with nepotism (some of my best friends are nepotists) but this was absurd; at least give me a slight increase in salary to lessen the pain. Even someone as green as I knew that I was being taken for a ride. I resigned.

A few teachers protested (really) and wanted me reinstated on a proper salary which was really sweet but I was never going to change my mind. I wanted to be a rock star, (didn’t I mention that one) a photographer and a poet. Pen and paper I could afford but I needed amps, effects and elinchrom flash heads and my current salary clearly wasn’t cutting it.