Chapter 4.

With only six months to go on the course I took a gap year during which I traveled to Remuera to work as a dish pig in two restaurants diagonally opposite each other at a large intersection. Cycling home in the dark one night I noticed up ahead a group of youths loitering on the footpath and spilling out onto the road. I didn't bother swerving for them and they grabbed my bike and brought me to a halt. One of them mashed a piece of buttered bread into my face, obviously leftover from what his mum had packed for him that night. Then they let me go so I carried on to the next intersection and stopped at the red light, which turned out to be a mistake because they caught me up and before I knew it I was out cold lying on the road and waking up to the sound of a concerned motorist yelling from her car, "leave him alone!" Needless to say I continued riding home making sure I'd left enough of a gap between myself and my pursuers before stopping at any more red lights. Also that year I did Axis Ad school for which I did two months work experience in an ad agency creative department under the auspices of creative director Gordon Clarke. At the time he was pitching for the Tourism NZ account which he lost with efforts like a picture of a man in a forest and the line, "Where the only man-made thing is you." The winning entry was the 100% Pure NZ campaign with the genius NZ % sign. To his credit GC was the first and only person to ever tell me to get over myself - probably the best slogan I've ever been given. Recently I googled him and read a funny story about how once while entertaining dinner guests he got up and started vacuuming. Despite my creative partner and I getting runner up we didn't get a job and I continued washing dishes and deep frying poppadoms and working on my portfolio before returning to AUT to finish my four-year diploma.