This post could fill a book. One day perhaps it will. So I'm going to make this the very short version.
I came to live in New York City in 1988. It was a dream come true. It was like stepping into a Bob Dylan song - or rather a hundred Bob Dylan songs. Positively 4th Street.
I stayed for seven years before I moved on to San Francisco. I knew almost as soon as I got there that I had done things the wrong way round. I knew just as quickly that I would be going back to New York. Four tumultuous years later I did exactly that.
In March 1999 I moved into the loft in Tribeca that I had never managed to afford during my first stay. It was very different. I was different - already in my late forties I was planning on getting married for the first time (it happened in 2000). And my city was different.
The changes the city had undergone were subtle at that time but they would become trends that would become waves that would see me and my favorite place diverging more and more.
In the next ten years I went through the biggest changes of my life. My very happy marriage. The sad loss of my father. The loss of dear family members back in England. The incredible highs of working with some great people who will be my friends for life and the slow realization that my life in the corporate world was coming to an end. The roller-coaster cliche (that I once made good use of in a TV commercial for AT&T) was very real.
Towards the end of this time I rediscovered, largely through the loss of my dad, my love for songwriting, music and poetry among other things. And again with the help of many incredible people I was able to step back into a world I thought I'd left behind in my British youth. I put out a CD of songs that, infused with the experiences I had now lived, I could finally say I was proud of.
In parallel to this I was losing more than a little of my love for the advertising world that had been so kind to me through the years. Again, this one point could fill a book but it's enough to say that all industries when threatened with extinction tend to make the wrong decisions and put the wrong people in charge. When I found myself working for one of the most shallow, talentless, narrow-minded men in the industry I knew things would come to a brutal end. And they did. I'm happy to report that my "end" has turned out to be a great start. He's still unsuccessfully working on a new start three years later. Some things and some people never change. And that, sadly, is advertising's problem. Talking change is easy, living it is hard.
I gave it one last, very enjoyable try - starting a company with one of the best men I'd met in the industry and in life. But our timing was wrong. The clients were not lining up as they would have in better economic times. But I would not trade one day of the year I shared a little office with Steve running our own company in our own way.
But back to the city. In the last ten years I've watched as neighborhoods blended with each other, as buildings of stark glass and steel and concrete were put up with zero attempt to match their surroundings. I watched neighborhood cafes, bars and restaurants go out of business because they couldn't match the rents that star-chef eateries and high end Sake bars and Champagne Lounges were willing to pay. I began to feel like I was living in a fashion magazine not a living, breathing city.
I watched as the Towers fell. The fact that there is still little more than a hole in the ground where they stood after nearly eight years is a fact this city should be ashamed of. And I've nothing more to say about that.
And now the economy has collapsed. The fat cats of Wall Street have brought this country to its knees. Yes, it's that bad and, I believe, about to get worse before it gets better. And suddenly those high end places that kicked out the family-run joints don't know how to keep going with less money around. But the businesses they replaced cannot come back - it's too late. You don't know what you've got till it's gone.
And so we leave tomorrow to start a new life in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A life based on love, music, art, new experiences, new sights, sounds, smells - with, at the heart of it all, a renewed passion for living and learning. In short, all the things that once brought me to New York.
I'll be writing again soon from the new home in the desert - but until then, thanks to all my friends, thanks to all my enemies (learning what you do not want to become is equally important!) and thanks to what my dear, dear departed friend Mark Gault used to call "This once-fine city."
