…I’ve been bartending coming up to four decades and I still love it, there’s plenty I don’t like about it, but I don’t spend time worrying about that, to quote the great man Bruce Lee;

“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.”

I grew up in South London in a working class family where a tin of “Swarfega” lived by the kitchen sink, this meant if you lived in our house you were expected to come home with your hands covered in grease.

Things were always tight, and we had little in the way of worldly possessions, but we always found a way to make our own fun. We grew up playing cards as a family because we were never able to afford a TV, which is still one of the key factors I feel in my passion for hospitality lasting, I love the banter and a good chat, as anyone that knows me will tell you.

Note: Swarfega was a hand cleaner only slightly less powerful than a nuclear war, it still exists bit the ingredients have changed due to its caustic nature.

In my teenage years, I worked as a COBOL programmer which is a 3rd generation language, one step removed from machine code. This involved me being sent on a course to learn Jackson Structured Programming (JSP), which basically is using a top down approach to solve problems. The problem is written down in a simple format, then split into smaller modules and ever smaller ones until each module does just one job. Then they are given to programmers to code.

If you’re still reading at this stage, the long and short of it is I’m an efficient geek at heart. Break big jobs down into small jobs, if they’re still too complicated break them down again. This is true of any project we take on. If you break it down and down until it is a single module, you can calculate the resources needed to complete the project.

At the same time, I was learning to code I was understudy to a very famous bartender at the Playboy Nightclub London, where I was starting to learn to ply my trade as a career bartender. This all boils down to me being extremely creative yet at the same time exceptionally logical.