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January 4, 2021
A faculty interview by the Boys School Academian Editor, Trajan.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in southeast London in a place called Penge in Bromley. I lived there for 11 years then we moved 2 miles up the road to Beckenham. I lived there until I was 26.
What’s one of your favorite childhood memories?
One that sticks out in my mind is my family used to have a small bungalow on the south coast of England. At night, we would get torches (flashlights) and we’d go over to the beach and walk the 3 or 4 miles of coast.
What job did you want as a kid?
I wanted to be a police officer from when I was about 5 or 6 years old.
What was your favorite subject in high school?
It was always one of my English classes because the teachers were really engaged; we weren’t just learning facts all the time. It was a little more fun.
Where did you go to college?
From high school, which ends around when you turn 16, I took two years of 6th form. So as soon as I turned 18, I applied for the police and luckily got in the first try.
Do you have any hobbies?
I only have two real hobbies: playing video games and Brazilian Jujitzu.
What is your favorite movie?
Right now it’s the John Wick series. It’s action, and there’s a lot of Brazilian Jujitzu in it, and seeing that on the screen is really fun.
What jobs did you have before working at ANC?
Police Officer in London: I was 18 when I joined the police and I just wanted to chase people, drive fast cars, catch bad guys. It may be a pretty vapid or base thing to want to do that for, but it eventually matured into different reasons. Day to day you start out in a response team, so if someone dialed 999, which is 911 here, the first people to respond would be the teams. They get all the calls from ‘my cat’s stuck in a tree’ to ‘there’s a robbery happening right now, come help me.’ So day to day you never really knew what you were going to do because it could be a really quiet shift or it could be an extreme situation which ties you up for 12-15 hours. So that was the fun of it.
Do you have any funny/interesting work stories?
Someone was chasing a suspect so a bunch of us turned up. He just disappeared, but we looked around and couldn’t find him. Then we got a call from his ex-girlfriend saying ‘So and so is at this location and he won’t leave.’ There must have been 20-30 thirty women just hanging out there. They say ‘oh yeah he's in our back garden’ We go through the house into the back garden and there are low fences about 4-5 feet tall. It’s the middle of the night, and we’re calling his name and looking for him with big torches. All of the sudden, this head pops up from over one of the fences, and he just sort of freezes as soon as my light stops on him. He just stopped and then slowly sunk back down behind the fence. So we just started bursting out laughing. We decided my colleague would stay there and make some noise, and I would go ‘round to where you’d end up if you started hopping fences. I got to the end of the road, and my friend started to hop the fences. The guy hears it and starts to run. Luckily, I’m waiting at the bottom, so as he jumps over the wall I come round the corner and tell him to stop. We have another short chase, and, being London, it’s rainy and wet with puddles everywhere. Eventually, I caught him and we had a little scuffle and he ended up face down in a puddle. In the end, we took him off to where he needed to go.