Thanks for your patience while I handled other stuff last week. Here are the last two autobiographical sketches that I wrote in 2009–11. There’s more to tell. I helped start a church, lost my faith and acquired more children. A lot of you have told me you love this series, but before I go on, I’d like to be sure, so…
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A lot of Christians like to choose or discover a quote from the bible that is a guiding statement for their life, sort of a motto or personal vision statement. This is called a life verse. I’ll tell you about mine.
After my son Teifion was stillborn in September 1999, Christine who had undiagnosed depression, became very ill. My dad’s church where I was youth pastor lost a large number of its members. All the staff had to go on half salaries. In November 2000 Christine, Callum (age 2.5) and I moved to North Wales. We knew no one. We were broke and broken. Throw in a grim mouldy house and couple miscarriages. It was quite a lot of hell. The road out was long and we travelled slowly. Along the way we had a lot of help from family, old and new friends, and strangers.
My life verse thing that kept me going when Christine was so sick with depression that all she wanted was out or we were so poor that for a treat we shared a chocolate bar. I discovered it in a mall not long after Teifion died. It was a slogan on an ugly T-shirt:
If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay on the porch.
That’s my life verse.
Have you got a life verse or something similar? Whack it in the comments!
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I moved to North Wales to be a graphic designer. While I was figuring out how to do that I worked in a shoe shop. In summer 2001, Eight months after we moved I decided to just start. I called my studio Tom’s Novelty Meats. I had no clients and no connections, so I looked at adverts in the newspaper to see what businesses could use and might be able to afford a graphic designer. Then I went and visited them.
My first client was a china and collectibles shop. After a few phone calls, I eventually got an appointment with the owner. When I met with him, he showed me the advertising they were doing and then blew me off. Their advertising was dreadful, but I clearly wasn’t wanted. I walked out discouraged. Walking back to my car, I realised that I had nothing to lose, so I turned around, walked back into the shop and pointed to his advert: ‘I just wanted to say that this is shit, and I can do something a lot better for you.’ Then I walked out again.
A couple days later his assistant called me up to ask me to do some newspaper ads for the new shop they were opening. She said he was impressed with my honesty.
A couple months later I quit my job at the shoe shop.
This time lapse of the set-up, concert and tear-down from U2’s Zoo TV tour is worth watching. The song is a good thing to keep in mind.
Grow slowly
Jeff
Your life verse reminds me of one I adopted when I quit my agency job to freelance. “If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.” I love that you told that dude the cold hard truth (especially as a fellow designer!!) My standard life verse fora couple decades has been, “Life ain’t as sweet without the sour.” (Which I lifted from Vanilla Sky.) And hopefully, with all the years of good times mixed with bad, could be adopted by yourself as well. Hopefully.
That video was incredible!! I was too young to see the Zoo TV tour but in my next life, it’s on. The closest I got was the Pop Mart stadium tour (where they ran out of big inflatable lemons and I was crushed.) Zooropa is one of the most underrated albums in existence.
Yes, of course we love hearing your life story. It's so interesting. As I mentioned before my life between the ages of about 7 and 33 revolved around the world of Girl Guiding. Its ethos resonated with me. Girl Guides have 10 laws that they live by - or at least they did then, and the one that I live to live my life by is: A Guide makes good use of her time.
I have more rest days now than I used to, but I feel that if my body needs rest in order to be more productive at other times, then a rest day IS making good use of my time, rather than continuing and ending up doing something of lower quality.