More about Johnny

Johnny studied Engineering at King’s College London and went on to work in Engineering insurance in the City of London. After 10 year of travelling to the least desirable destinations in the world, becoming very proficient at fiddling expense forms and being mindlessly bored in the office he decided there was more to life than insurance. Johnny had met and married Sarah, and Poppy was born in 1996. They lived in a house in Alma Road, Wandsworth where family life was near perfect. Johnny left the City without any clear plan of action other than to get away from big organisations, try to work out what to do with himself and offer some half credible explanation why he had given up his career. Time passed and Johnny occupied himself with various schemes, including working for a local landscape gardener, installing sundials for an artist friend, renovating the house in Wandsworth and doing a course on interior design. A friend asked Johnny if he would lend a hand on the phones during a sales campaign for his software business. An embryonic business he had set up in a backroom near the Alma pub with big ambitions but no money or staff. The campaign went well and over the next 4 years the company rode the dotcom rollercoaster inflating to a multimillion pound turnover during the bubble and down the other side when the bubble burst. An amazing experience to be involved in a growing organisation with young talented people full of optimism and then having to wind the business back. In 2002 there was a choice to be made – to take a cut in income and ride the storm out or change direction altogether. Florence was born in 1999 and a family routine established where Johnny would do the early shift, getting the kids to nursery and Sarah the evening shift, collecting the kids before 6.30pm. The problem facing this arrangement was that there was little margin for error and the dilemmas of prioritising between two demanding jobs and family life. 2002 was crunch time, the strain was beginning to show and it was suggested that the family’s wellbeing would be best preserved by living up a mountain in some distant land. The rest is history...