At the time I wrote the initial website, I had just left working for Fujitsu as a consultant in their training division.  It had been a difficult time for the training business and, to be quite frank, it wasn't the place it used to be.  Some months previously they had sold the beautiful Beaumont training centre in Windsor and I was now travelling an hour to an office building which was increasingly becoming a depressing place to work.

So, I could see that the writing was on the wall and instead of waiting for the business to collapse (as it eventually did) I got out and decided that what I really needed was a change.  A proper change.

I have a number of friends in the hospitality business (bars, restaurants, that sort of thing) and being a reasonably affable kind of guy I thought I might want to buy a bar/restaurant for myself.  Never having run one though, it would have been a bit of a gamble to pile whatever savings I had into a business which I didn't know much about, commercially or operationally, if it turned out that I didn't like it, or even that it didn't like me.

So as one of my very good friends was in the final stages turning a run down old pub into a shiny new Gastro Pub (a pub with an up-market restaurant) in London I agreed to go work with him for three or four months to see how I got on.

Well this was a complete departure for me.  I had never set foot in a professional kitchen before, never mind run a restaurant, manage a bar or find some way of keeping the 'old clientelle' out in order to encourage a much more agreeable clientelle to come in, again and again and again.

Suffice to say, the place went from strength to strength and we were nominated as one of the top ten bars in London, by the major London evening newspaper.

I really did enjoy it.  Under my friends vast experience I learnt a huge amount about the hospitality business.  We had some great party's and working there was, in the main, a blast.  The people we had working for us were generally in their early to mid twenties, really bright people being mainly university graduates taking a gap year and travelling the world and I must say I loved working with them.  They made working there fun, challenging and they appeal to my nature and attitude to life.  And the customers were equally enjoyable to be around.

New Year party's were just great and I can honestly say that the time I spent there was very happy.  There was no way after only 3 months that I was anywhere near prepared to go buy a bar/restaurant of my own, so in the end my 3 or 4 months lasted a year and three months !!

But it was a very different lifestyle to that which I was used, with very long and unsociable hours.  There are also 101 things over and above running the restaurant which need constant attention.  Accounts, wages, suppliers, staff (always new staff to recruit and train) buildings to maintain, and in the end it was these things on the periphery of running the business which made me decide that behind the 'glamour' of running the business, there are an awful lot of other issues which can jeapordise a very fickle business.

So after a very enjoyable time there, I knew it wasn't my real vocation and I determined to go find out what was.