What was your first job?

...And what did you learn from it?

Apr 25, 2025

I had a good break from work last week. So much so that it was a bit of a shock getting back to things this week!

I am still reflecting on the nature of work and my relationship with it so that I can hopefully embrace some kind of productive ease in the future.

As writers, we get messages about fitting it in to the edges of the day, to write every day and there are stories about people who get their first drafts down at 4am during a period of months. Over time, this is exhausting. Writing is important to me but a lot of the legwork happens without pay, which means I need to earn money at the same time. Together with other tasks and responsibilities, it is a lot. However, I know that freeing up the weight of this, together with playful creativity and curiosity and rest really does help. So I’m looking back at my life to see where my thoughts about work have come from.

I have been working since I got a paper round at the age of 14. I hadn’t long moved into the city and finding my way around the back streets was fun. I had a short round of 25 papers to be delivered through the city centre. It took me around half an hour before school. I remember wearing an industrial waterproof coat, wellies and together with the big orange bag for carrying the papers feeling important and invincible even in the rain.

I imagined that being out so early on the streets I would surely see things others missed and be called as a witness on Crimewatch one day. I taught myself the shapes and names of cars as I went along for some kind of future when this knowledge might come in handy.

I got paid £3 for the whole week and I’d collect my earnings on a Saturday morning then take it straight to Woolworths where I’d spend it on records in the bargain bin. Even in 1985, this £3 didn’t seem like much to me for the amount of work and so instead of asking for a raise or a paper round with more drops, I did what I’m now realising is a pattern in my freelance life — I took on more work. Despite being already busy with school, orchestra, girl guides and volleyball club, I decided that I could add on another delivery round on the weekend for a free newspaper.

This free paper had to be delivered to every single house. There wasn’t a spare round where I lived so I gave them my grandparents’ address. This added an extra 20 minutes walk, but the good thing about this paper round was its flexibility. They would deliver the papers to my grandparents’ house on a Friday and as long as they were delivered by Sunday night, I would get paid.

The problem was that I underestimated the time it would take to deliver a paper to every single house on the grid of streets close to their house, and the extra time added to walk around the prison walls and football pitch. Every weekend, I put off this job until the last minute and by the time I got there, my kind grandfather had delivered most of them (sorry, Grampa!!).

Looking back at these first jobs, I am surprised to see the patterns that have echoed throughout my freelance life. Taking on work that I knew was badly paid, then taking on more work to mitigate that problem, appreciating the flexibility but then not estimating time well, procrastinating and leaving things until the last minute. I am much better at planning and estimating time now, but I am still not good at charging a sustainable amount of money and so end up taking on more work to compensate.

What was your first job? And what did you learn? Have you taken any patterns through to the rest of your life?

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