Just did it

Czech said that someone had found his site because they Google'd "who is the real Bobby Vanquish?"

Someone else I've come to know said that they were bored with their life and wanted to make a change.

This is for both of them...

Up until 2003 I was living in Cape Town. I like to think that it was marvellous but had it really been, I wouldn't have wanted the change.

I had a good job, a pretty swish car, a great circle of friends... yadda yadda - by other people's standards - which they constantly reminded me about - it was brilliant.

However, all the time I had a niggling feeling that there was something better for me somewhere else in the world.

I like to think that London found me but it was probably the other way around.

In no time I found myself on a South African Airways plane to Heathrow on 17 January 2003. I had £1,200 and a suitcase full of CVs.

I can remember the flight like it was yesterday. I remember arriving at Heathrow as an adult - without my parents.

From having my own flat in Cape Town at 26 years old with a parking space and good lighting, I went to sleeping on friends' couches.

I got my first job at a call-centre in Finsbury Park to earn some money. I had to sell shite jewellery to old women.

For the next two months, by day I had to endure pissed-out old birds on the phone while at night I wrote and mailed CVs. I cried in the toilet at work a lot.

The volume of CVs and letters I sent out is contained in files that are difficult to hold because they're so thick.

Finally I got an interview with a company I wanted to work for. They offered me a job with a £17,000 salary.

I took it, worked it, grabbed it and after about a year left - with the experience for something better.

Four years later I am earning triple that, working for a firm that is credited around the world as being the greatest at what it does.

I had never worked in TV and film before but it's what I always wanted to do. I didn't give up and until I got what I wanted.

Yeah, at times it was shit. Yeah, I wanted to go back to Cape Town but I look back now and can't imagine it any differently.

I now look forward to going back to Cape Town on holiday and spending three weeks on the beach. That would never have happened if I'd stayed.

Yep, the piles of paperwork, letters and applications I saved from the time I was pursuing my dream all have one thing in common...

...they're all filed under 'rejected'.

There are only three letters in the whole pile that start with the words "congratulations, we have pleasure in offering you..."

So that's a little of who I am. Take it or leave it. But whatever you want to do - if you want to change your life - start changing it now.

And by the way - phoning old grannys is the worst job I've ever had to do. Can it get any worse? I don't think I got off lightly. I know there's someone out there who's had a worse job than that.

At the time, one of the guys I was sharing a house with had a job in Acton where he had to pack CDs into the cardboard sleeves for the free newspaper giveaways. Now that's shit.