I Love My Job

I met Markus Stitz just over a year ago, when I started cycling the Edinburgh version of Dawn Patrol that he set up. Dawn Patrol rides leave from the centre of the city at 5:40am a few times a week, for either a road or a gravel ride of about 30km, which ends at Cairngorm Coffee. All in time to fit in before starting work. Markus has managed to put his love of cycling at the heart of how he makes...

I've gone off-piste from I Love My Job for this episode. This is a love letter to my cycling group Dawn Patrol, which meets three times a week at 05:40 (yep, in the morning) to cycle the same 18 miles / 30 km or so each time and then have coffee together, before heading off and tackling the day. This group has become very special to a lot of us and I wanted to give everyone the opportunity to...

Today I’m talking to Nigel Forster, who builds guitars for a living. He did his apprenticeship with Stefan Sobell, who is considered one of the best in the world at his craft. After working under Stefan, Nigel set up his own guitar-making workshop in Newcastle back in 2004. If you ordered a guitar from him today, you would need to wait at least a year before you got it. When I look at the photos o...

Today I’m talking to Angie, who’s been a yoga teacher for the past 10 years. About a year ago, Angie set up her own yoga studio in Edinburgh with two good friends and I’ve been taking her classes there for the last few months. I liked Angie straight away ... it would be hard not to … she’s one of those people who doesn’t put up any barriers, right from the beginning. She’s warm and friendly and sh...

Today I'm talking to Chef Jean-Pierre, who I found out about when a friend put me on to his YouTube channel. He demonstrates how to cook anything from classic French onion soup to the perfect steak, and strawberry tart. At last count he had 1.6 million followers. You quickly understand why when you take a look at what he does, or more to the point how he does it. He has a great sense of humou...

Today I'm talking to Tim, who after working his way through different jobs in the travel industry, took a leap of faith 10 years ago to become a freelance mountain guide.  Tim leads groups of either adults or school children in places as diverse as the Scottish Highlands, Nepal and East Africa. He not only guides people around the mountains, he also tries to teach his guests something about t...

Today I’m talking to Zoë, who flies helicopters to transport people from Aberdeen in Scotland to offshore oil and gas platforms in the North Sea. Before moving over to commercial flying, Zoë was in the military, having trained at the highly-regarded Sandhurst academy. Even before I spoke to Zoë, I got the impression that she was a high achiever and when I listen back to the recording of our interv...

Today I’m talking to Victoria Watson, creative producer at Eyebolls, her own animation company in Scotland. Eyebolls creates things like cinema ads and short films using live action (real people) or animation. It sounds like Victoria was hooked on animation before she even left school. This is one of those stories where teachers tried to tell Victoria she would never get into art school. She very...

Today I’m talking to Niamh and Mark, who realised a long-held dream when in December 2017 they took over the Pyrenees Cycling Lodge in France, right near the border with Spain. Tucked away in a picturesque village, the lodge has breathtaking views of the Pyrenees from its bedroom windows. The cyclists who arrive from around the world on holiday only have to concentrate on one thing - cycling up an...

Today I’m talking to John Flinders, who is a classically-trained pianist who graduated from York University and then the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. He was drawn to the idea of being on stage with other musicians, working together, more so than playing as a solo concert pianist. That took him down the path of becoming an accompanist, which means he plays for soloists such as cla...

Today I'm talking to Rebecca Roger Cruz, a Venezuelan singer, songwriter, and vocal coach. Rebecca lives in France and I saw her perform in December as part of the group Aa'in (Rebecca plus a Venezuelan guitarist and a Colombian musician, who switched effortlessly between instruments including the double bass).  I knew nothing about the concert beforehand - someone had recommended it to...

Today I’m talking to Stan Medved. Stan has quite an unusual job. He works for a large global company that has its own three business jets to fly the company’s executives around the world. Stan is not only one of the pilots, he's also in charge of the three-jet operation, which he runs essentially like a small airline within the company. When I met Stan cycling last year, he immediately came a...

Today I'm talking to Adam Turner, who started playing squash when he was six years old and basically hasn’t stopped since. He was clearly a talented and motivated young player because he reached no. 1 in England for under 13s and then again for under 15s. In the interview, Adam talks about the choices you face between turning professional as a sports person and, alternatively, continuing to p...

I met Orissa in July when I rode a few stages of the Tour de France (which I talk about in the episode Something a Little Different). Orissa was one of the physios looking after us as cyclists and she did that work to take a quick breather from her full-time job at Great Ormond Street, considered to be the UK’s leading children’s hospital. Before the interview, I had no idea of the breadth of work...

Scott lives in one of the most stunning parts of the world - Chamonix, France. He works for himself as a physiotherapist and bike fitter and has done some very impressive long-distance, self-supported bike races and solo bike adventures around the world. But it hasn't come easily and his is one of those stories (like most of us, I think) where it would be all too easy to assume from his Insta...

Meet Pierre, who talks in this interview about how laughing can be an escape from the difficulties of life and how, as he said, love is joy. Pierre's clown character is Anatol, someone who Pierre says has a big heart. But I think it is Pierre who has the big heart. He has a wonderful and irresistible take on life and he does a great job of describing what motivated him to become a clown and h...

I first met a therapeutic clown a couple of years ago and I was captivated as he described what his work was about - walking into a hospital room in clown character, with his heart on his sleeve, and inviting the child in front of him to put aside for a moment all the difficulties and worries connected to their stay in hospital. Then my path crossed a few months ago with Suzie and Diane, and I was...

Tim built the company Innovatise from scratch with his business partner and today the apps the company has developed attract 2.1 million users per month. He started his career with IBM and went on to work for Intel in Silicon Valley. Once back in the UK, he got involved with some IT startups that he went on to sell. He has clearly struck the right balance between his technical background and his a...

You might have noticed that there haven't been any new episodes for a while ... I have been distracted in July in the best possible way as I put normal life on hold and cycled seven stages of the 2022 Tour de France with a group of other amateur cyclists. It's a well-worn phrase, but it really was the experience of a lifetime. A few days after I got home, I realised that I was already fo...

Golda Fischer grew up speaking three languages - German, Hungarian and English. She also grew up with a love for the theatre and she has managed to combine both into quite an unusual job. Golda translates the surtitles that enable someone to watch a live performance in a language that isn't their own. But her job goes beyond simply translating. The nature of live performance is such that crea...

Emma Bell rose quickly through the ranks during her first career, becoming one of the youngest people to make partner in a law firm in Scotland. She went on to become a judge. On the back of a lightbulb moment, Emma followed her instinct and began developing her own business as a coach, working with themes such as leadership, resilience, and conflict resolution. You only need to read the testimoni...

On the heels of my interview with Joe, meet Chlöe.  Chlöe and Joe met during their ambulance technician training a year ago. I've asked both of them almost the same questions, because ultimately everyone's take on the same situation is going to be unique. One thing that Chlöe and Joe have in common from my perspective is that they already show so much poise after only a year in a job tha...

This was a very special interview for me and it stayed in my mind for several days afterwards. Joe is my nephew. I have photos of him from when he was about five years old. He's now 22 and his job is genuinely to save lives. In the past, I mainly caught up with Joe at Christmas or a similar big family gathering. But this time it was just him and me, and I was totally taken aback by how well-c...

I vividly remember my first clarinet lesson with Jean, who was there to help me prepare for a music exam. I felt very self-conscious as I played my exam pieces in front of her, a professional clarinettist, and I was pretty mortified with how I sounded. But I quickly realised that my lessons were never going to be about me feeling embarrassed about my playing, they were about working hard together...