My BackgroundLong ago in a grimy smog stricken slum in Leeds, I decided to become a doctor or dentist in general practice, partly because of my antipathy to working for anyone else and my reluctance to have to crawl my way up through a company, hospital or any institution. In other words, I realised I was leaning strongly to being self-employed. There was no family tradition of being entrepreneurial and I admit the thought never really occurred to me beyond maybe being a small shop keeper, but that needed capital and we didn’t have any. I soon gave up on the idea of medicine and applied for dentistry and, years later, ended up graduating from Newcastle in the freezing North East of England.
Time rolled inexorably on and I became bored with general practice and wanted some sort of change, though I felt I was too specifically qualified and still wanted to work for myself. I wasn’t seeing enough of my wife and three rapidly growing children and although I had a decent...
