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Why I quit my well-paid job in Marketing to become a Plumber

Written under the pseudonym Nicholas James (LH ??)

I have some very fond memories of my time at Uppingham in the 1980s. I particularly remember my housemasters, David Gaine and Michael Trenwith, History with Eric Boston and English with Mr Tolkien. After I left school, I studied Law at university before embarking on a successful career in marketing. But I really wanted to be a writer. After I finished my degree, I did a post-graduate diploma in publishing. My plan was to work for a book publisher. Then I was going to subtly slip my manuscript in using a pseudonym, so they didn’t know it was me. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out.

Ten years flew by, I met my wife and before I knew it, we were settling down. Then, when I became a father for the first time, I suddenly realised I wasn’t doing what I really needed to do. I felt like I was living someone else’s life and I knew I had to do something about it. I didn’t want my kids to grow up with an unhappy, frustrated father. So, after discussing it with my very understanding wife, I quit my well-paid job in marketing to pursue my writing ambitions and retrained as a plumber to earn some money on the side.

All my friends thought I was having a premature mid-life crisis. My parents thought I’d gone completely mad.

After all I was entirely rejecting the life that they had envisioned for me. I didn’t see it that way. I wanted to be involved in bringing up my kids, I didn’t want to be stuck in an office anymore and I wanted to write a book. Fortunately, I was already fairly handy – all those carpentry lessons with Joe Davison had stood me in good stead.

Over the years I’ve worked for a complete cross section of society; judges and drug addicts; rock stars and railway workers; Oscar winners and obstetricians. I’ve employed astrophysicists and alcoholics. Some of the tradesmen I’ve worked with may have been terrorists; my carpenter was an ex-convict; my plasterer was also a prop maker for feature films; and my electrician used to be a theatrical agent. I’ve been told that I challenge social norms and that I cross the social divide. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I’ve always been interested in people and I really don’t care where they come from or what they do for a living.

I’m not going to pretend that plumbing is a glamorous profession, because it isn’t. Sometimes it’s downright disgusting, but it did give me a unique insight into lots of people’s lives. It provided me with all the inspiration I needed to fulfil my writing ambitions. During lockdown I wrote a book about what it’s like to be a London plumber and PIPE DREAMS is the result. The publishers are calling it Tales of the Unexpected in overalls. The Times, The Independent, The Daily Mail and The Sun have all covered it and it might soon be turned into a TV series. If someone had told me when I left school that I was going to become a plumber, I would have laughed at them. It just goes to show that lots of our alumni go on to do a vast variety of different things, some of which are completely unexpected.

I’ve written the book using a pseudonym, to protect my anonymity. That’s just about the only part of the original plan that didn’t change. So, you won’t recognise the name, but some people know who I am, because over the years I might have built them a bathroom. No-one ever expects an OU to be a plumber, so when I turned up, carrying my toolbox, they couldn’t believe it was me.

Becoming a plumber is the best thing I have ever done. It propelled my life in a very different direction, and it helped me to fulfil my pipe dream of becoming a published author.

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