Tag: Culture

At 12, I started working as a kitchen porter at a local hotel. [Yep, 12. It was run by my best friend’s mum and dad, and they were big fans of illegal child labour!] First day – I absolutely hated it. I was doing cutlery, and can vividly remember how utterly bored I was. But I worked in that kitchen every year until I left school at 18. [I eventually moved on from cutlery. The

Late ’95, I moved to London for the second time and got a job as a luggage porter at a swanky hotel near Marble Arch. I’d worked in a hotel before, loved it, and thought this would be the same … Didn’t quite work out like that. Tips were everything, and £100 a shift wasn’t particularly unusual. In theory, there was a complicated ‘honour’ system in place that dictated how tips were divided – but