Twelve summers ago, just before our first child was born, my wife and I almost quit our sensible London jobs to run a smokehouse in Suffolk. We’d never run a smokehouse before. We’d never even run a business before. But we were awfully fond of smoked cod’s roe. And Suffolk.
I stumbled upon the email the other day, while searching for something else. It was almost comic in its naivety. A fledgling family offering to take on an established, struggling family business. No thought of notice periods or maternity pay or balance sheets or smoking techniques (you just whack the fish on the head, take a deep breath and shove it up the chimney, right?). As with parenting, we’d make it up as we went along. The family said a polite no, and we returned to London, an emergency C-section and a different sort of adventure.
It wasn’t, however, the first – or last – time that the summer sun has gone to my head. In 1999, while teaching English in an Arab village in Israel, a friend and I came within a whisker of buying a beat-up Beetle and vanishing in the middle of the night, Tracey Chapman’s Fast Car playing on an ironic mix tape as we headed slowly towards Cape Town. Three summers later, during a long university holiday, another friend and I talked endlessly about abandoning our degrees and driving a tuk-tuk home from India.
