Thursday, 4 June 2026
Yesterday afternoon was mine. Not for client calls or strategy decks. For a muddy field, a 16-year-old and a pony.
My job: poo picking, nettle avoidance, relocating beetles the size of a small country and approaching electric fences with considerably more respect than I did the first time.
It was wet, cold and windy. Not a highlight reel moment.
But I’ve been thinking about where I learnt the things that make me good at my job. The instinct for a story. The soggy notebook and frozen fingers gripping a pencil. The graft. The ‘just get on with it’ that no course teaches you.
It started in my grandfather’s architect’s practice. Then my dad’s. Weekends, school holidays, just watching people build things – ideas, businesses, buildings – from nothing.
It was selling garden fruit and flowers from an old rabbit hutch at the end of the road. Learning early that if you want money, you find something people want and you turn up.
I watch my daughters now. One fundraising for an expedition during her GCSEs, competing on a pony, preparing for her A-levels and whatever comes next. The other quietly building a craft business online and already talking about the business she wants to run one day. They’re 16 and 12.
They don’t call it entrepreneurship. They just do it.
That’s not balance. That’s just how it gets passed on.
You don’t teach the next generation graft by talking about it. You take them to muddy fields on cold Wednesdays. You let them watch you work. They’re watching whether you know it or not.
I’m a PR and communications consultant. Former journalist. Former police communicator. Storyteller. My office is a desk in a sliding wardrobe. My boardroom was a muddy field yesterday. Narnia has nothing on it.
The stories I’m proudest of are still in progress. One competes on weekends. The other is building an empire from the kitchen table.
Is there a work-life balance? Or is it just life, if you’re lucky enough to be doing the right things with the right people?