I remember very little about this place except that I worked for some professional firm that was providing expert witness testimony to the inquiry into the fire at King's Cross Station (so that would make it the Spring of 1988) and I was there as a photocopier operator.

I hardly saw anyone all day, I was in the basement with a photocopier for company.  The jobs would come down from the office upstairs on a dumb waiter with a covering instruction sheet and be sent back up the same way.

I'm pretty sure it was working here that convinced me to learn to touch type so that I could get more interesting work.

Now this is the home of, among other things, the Metropolitan Police Authority.  But in the spring of 1988 it was the first place that I went to work in an office in London.

I'd just finished a few weeks at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham in the chorus of The King and I and I had no more work.  My then girlfriend, later my wife, now my ex-wife... chivvied me (I think that's the right word) into signing up for temp office work rather than "resting" - she insisted that I sign on with agencies and pester them until I got some work, any work, that would bring some cash in and stop me sponging off her. Damn!

So within a week or so I was sent along to this building in Dean Farrar Street, just behind New Scotland Yard to work in the General Office of Cipfa Services Ltd - which had been a kind of research and consulting arm of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy before a management buy-out.

I truly have very little idea of what the work was that they did there, although it was probably very close to work that I later did at the Audit Commission.  All I knew was they produced reports, lots of them and they needed to be photocopied and bound and that was my job.  I'd never used a photocopier before, but I quickly became a master of all its functions, dazzling my manager with stunning copying geek skillz - mainly because I think I was the first person to actually read the manual and think about what they were doing.

Of course I also enjoyed being stationed opposite the typing pool  For younger readers, I should explain that this wasn't a swimming pool provided for staff to sit around with their laptops.  No, this was where typing got done.  Very few other people in the building had a computer on their desk, let alone their lap - and those that did would never have thought of using it for word-processing, that's what the pool was therefore - about 10 young women who sat and typed from audio or manuscript and who would feel overworked if you asked for something with less than 24 hours notice.

I stayed there for a while.  They offered me a job.  I turned it down to go to non-existent auditions for never-appearing acting work.  I loved the non-commitment of temping, like I was a bit of an outlaw, not fully employed, but getting paid (£5ph!) and I really enjoyed doing a good job, quickly and surprising people with what could be done to make the reports look even better.  I particularly loved pasting up pages that had charts on them.  These were created by a separate team who had a computer and a plotter.  The charts had to be cut to size and pasted (yes literally, with a pritt stick) into a space left by the typist in the middle of a page.  Reworking reports was therefore horribly time-consuming and stress-making so many things would go out not quite right.

The style of these reports were the inspiration for the first (and so far only) Tuttle Club Annual Report that I wrote 18 months ago.

This is the first place I ever worked for money - it  was owned and run by my uncles Lloyd and Bill.  The building has been replaced, but it's still in the family. 

I had three stints there - in 1980 I did a few days while we were on a fortnight's holiday in the kitchen, washing up.  Great, repetitive work - pretty (and some not so pretty) waitresses filled up the shelves with dirty plates, mugs and cutlery and I transferred everything into the washer and when it was full set it off.  When it got busy I'd have a few trays lined up.  It rarely got *that* busy.  Every now and then I took a pile of plates or a bucket of cutlery through to the people serving.  The rest of the time was spent winking at waitresses and chatting to the lad who's job it was to make chips.  Not fry chips, mind you, that was a higher-up specialist job.  No, the lad who poured spuds into the machine, pressed a button and then scooped the chips up in a bucket to give to the fryers.

To earn a few extra pennies and perhaps a bit of fried chicken, in the evening afterwards I'd wait around till the cafe had shut and then clean the floor: washing soda, disinfectant, hot hot water and a big fat mop getting into every corner and all along the skirting boards.

The following year, the year I did my 'O' levels, I worked in the Ice Cream kiosk for six weeks.  I stayed with my uncle and aunt and most days I walked up and over the hill to open up, worked all day, got some chips for my tea and walked home again.  I learned a lot about selling, building relationships with people on Saturday night when they arrived, making a good impression so that they came back all week.  Learning that it's the mums and grandma's who hold the purse strings and so although dealing with young ladies in bikinis is fun, there's more cash in flirting with the older ones.

I also learned that there's always something to do.  Mixing up the ice cream for the whippy machine; keeping an eye on stock and working out orders; cleaning, cleaning, cleaning; giving sneaky freebies to my cousin; holding the car-park bloke's bag while he runs after someone who's nicked a deckchair; helping out carrying boxes in the gift shop to curry favour with yet another pretty girl; just being there and smiling so that people know there's someone there - all part of the job.

And I went back and did it the next year too. I think that was the year my cousin Paul did the car park but gave it up because it included cleaning the toilets and one week someone kept going in there and smearing shit all over the walls.  Nice.  I focused on not getting found out and thumped by the guy who was supposed to be going out with the gift-shop girl I was snogging.  I didn't completely escape injury though - I piled too many boxes of ice-cream mix on the shelf above the door and one day they all came tumbling down on top of me.

I can't remember how much I was paid  but I have a feeling it was less than a pound an hour and I don't remember having many days off - not because I was made to, just because I loved turning up and being useful every day.  Ah youth.