A Journey From There To Here
Programming Note: While I write literally all day at work - emails, slack messages, whiteboards and more, I haven’t actually sat down and truly written anything in many years. Encouraged by my wife, Mary, to start sharing some of the stories of my life, especially with our daughter, Emma, I’m going to take on the challenge of writing down as much as I can remember about the moments which have been important to me along the way.
Emma, I hope one day you’ll read and enjoy these as much as I’ve enjoyed remembering them.
I still remember the moment I walked through the departure gate at Heathrow Airport really vividly. I had tears in my eyes as I waved goodbye to my best friend, and with little luggage in hand but my trusty Doctor Martens on my feet, I took the steps towards security, and never really looked back. I’m sure I must have been at the time, but I don’t recall ever feeling nervous about the move to America.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved American culture. I was most definitely ‘the Star Wars kid’ at school, instantly converted after my father took me to see it during an outpatient visit from long-term complications from a collapsed lung when I was 4. I grew up loving all the TV shows, from Knight Rider to The A-Team, He-Man to Thundercats, I was hooked, and never really stopped being hooked to this day. As a teenager I used to stay up late and watch Channel 4’s American sitcom shows on a Friday night - Cheers, Newhart, The Golden Girls and more, often thinking how great it would be to live in America, which seemed a world away from the rural England I was in at the time. It always seemed like the sky was bluer, the grass was greener (literally and figuratively), and the people who lived there dreamed bigger, and simply had more fun. The pursuit of happiness indeed. I remember summers watching music videos of life in the big cities, especially New York - Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls just wanna have fun’, Ray Parker Junior’s ‘Ghostbusters’ and even The Bangles’ ‘Walk like an Egyptian’. You don’t see those kinds of music videos any more (hey, you don’t even really see music videos any more), but they sowed a seed that was fast becoming a field of crops.
With the exception of music (I’m still firmly and Anglophile when it comes to what I listen to), movies, TV, food, sport, all of it captured my imagination, and just never let go. I vividly remember watching The Browns on a grainy color TV at my Grandparents’ house over the winter holiday, and seeing the grey, industrial footage of Cleveland. The bitter cold, The Dawg Pound, the viciously inhospitable climate, combined with the rabid fans who truly loved their team. The team was the city, and the city was its team. Of course that exists in English sports as well, but there was something that truly sparked my imagination about those games.
In between ending school and starting college, my dad had won a car in the work Christmas raffle, and when we all spoke about selling our current car and what to do with the money, there was never any doubt in my mind about what we should do. “We should go to America”. This ended up being a two-week vacation in Florida - the first week focused on the theme parks - Disney, Busch Gardens and the like, and the second a beach vacation near Fort Lauderdale. I was right - the sky was bluer, the grass was greener, and the people were friendlier. I didn’t really care that much for the beach vacation, and mainly spent it in the apartment watching baseball, which I didn’t understand at the time, but was fascinated by the culture and spectacle of it all. It just seemed so much more vibrant and exciting than English sport, which seemed to just be a mixture of browns, grays and subdued colors. I remember falling in love with Best Buy’s music department, buying Browns memorabilia (or what little I could find in Florida at least), and weird foods like Bart Simpson gum in a toothpaste tube. I loved the Double Gulps from 7-Eleven, Burger King, Tower Records and everything advertised on the sides of the road. I felt like I’d had the back of my head blown off.
My room as a teenager, around 1990, probably not long after we’d gone to America for the first time. Plenty of things that are still with me - Browns, Manchester indie music, and I still stack books and magazines that way. I wish I’d kept that Pixies ticket.
Years later, during my last year at Kingston University, we spent a small family vacation in New York over the Christmas and New Year break. I don’t remember us being there for either holiday, so it must have just been the 4-5 days in between. We stayed just off 5th Avenue, near The Empire State Building, and I often think about tracking down where that was as I think the hotel still exists and I’ve probably passed it dozens of times. I remember the bitter cold, but the amazing buildings, the incredible art, the grainy in-room cable TV, the enormous food. We didn’t spend that much time downtown - something that’s still true for me today, but I took hundreds of photos, and just got that very strong sense of home from the place. At this point I still wasn’t really thinking seriously about moving to America, and the prospect of it was just so unknown that I didn’t even really know where to start. A friend of ours in the year above us at Kingston had applied to Parsons, but didn’t get in, and the whole thing just seemed so cost-prohibitive.
During my time at University, my parents had relocated to Phoenix, where my dad had gotten a job at Boeing working on their new helicopter series. As part of their relocation package, I got to travel over there and visit essentially for free, something I only effectively did once during the summer break between my first and second years in Holland. There was an aborted Christmas trip where I traveled from Holland to Phoenix, only 2 days later for us all to go back to England due to an unforeseen, but benign cancer scare with my mother. During that summer, I’d recently broken up with my long-term girlfriend Cosi, and really wasn’t feeling that great about life. I remember spending long hours watching TV (mainly Elvis movies, VH1 and MTV), swimming in the pool, and exploring the local book stores. As part of that exploration, we went to drive-in-movies, football and hockey games, built our own burgers at Fuddruckers, went to Las Vegas and stayed in the Luxor hotel, visited the Grand Canyon, the Biosphere, and perhaps most oddly, this is where I discovered a small company out of the Pacific North West called Bungie. A company whose work would stay with me for a very, very long time.
In typical Shadbolt family fashion, my dad and I had an argument in the car on the way back to the airport to drop me off, just the same as we’d done when my parents dropped me off when I first moved to London, but I knew I’d be back. I didn’t know when, or how, or really what that meant, but I knew.
When I came back to London from studying in Holland for my masters degree, I regrouped by living in a tiny bedsit apartment next door to where I’d lived as a student, and picked up a freelance design job at QVC, which was at the time just starting to think about the internet and what it meant for their business. I started on four days a week, mainly designing the kinds of late-nineties web things you’d expect - simple interfaces, buttons, cutting out products on to different backgrounds, that kind of thing. Fast forward three years and I was full-time, running a large group of designers, and making occasional trips over to QVC’s headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, deep in Amish country about an hour west of Philadelphia. Our evening trips to The King Of Prussia Mall were always a highlight.
There’s people you meet along the way in life who have the capacity to completely change everything for you. Sometimes you can feel it before it happens, but mostly it’s just completely unexpected. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have known several of these transformative folks so far in life. The first was my technical drawing teacher at school, Mr. Moran. The first teacher to not just believe in me, but to tell me they believed in me. I was lucky enough to track him down a few years ago, and while he didn’t remember me, I was thrilled to be able to tell him what he had meant to me. The second was Jo Frenken, the computer lab assistant at The Jan van Eyck Akademie, a friend to this day who took the raw materials of a scared indie kid from London, kidding himself he could be an artist, and molded him into a confident interactive designer in two short years.
I don’t have many pictures of me during my time in Holland, but I always loved this one. This is after Jon Thompson had given a speech about my time there. I was close to tears, and came back down those steps to a big hug from Jo.
The third was Tim Megaw, who originally hired me at QVC in London based off a cold letter asking if they needed anyone who knew about websites, and then hired me again at QVC in America to run their on-air graphics department. Tim had been promoted from his Head of Broadcasting role at QVCUK in London to essentially do the same thing in the US, and we’d often kept in touch since his move. I’d always hit it off with Tim, and loved his irreverence, sense of humor, and abilty to remain completely unphased by the chaos of live television all around him. He’d often tease me by telling me that I should come over and work with him, to which I’d always say “All I need is an invitation Tim”.
And then of course he called my bluff and actually did exactly that.
I tell the story often as, like all good historical events, I remember the exact moment where I was when that offer came in. I was in my office at QVCUK in London, where literally the phone rang one morning, and it was Tim. He explained that while we’d often joked together about me coming over and working with him, this time he actually had something I might be interested in, and should we talk more seriously about what that all might look like. We chatted about what the role was, what might be involved, and how my current managers had all been briefed and were supportive. He asked me to think about it and let him know.
Again, I’d recently broken up with a girlfriend, Sarah, and didn’t really have any ties in London, but was enjoying living back there, and finally had some stability around my living arrangements after all the years of nomadic student living. I was enjoying some professional success at work, especially around our interactive TV efforts, and finally was earning some money, had a great little apartment in Richmond, my own car that I’d bought off a friend and was enjoying restoring, was going out a lot to see bands and be at the pub with my friends. Life in the summer of 2001 was generally pretty good.
My Mini outside my apartment in Richmond, London.
It broke my heart when I had to sell this before moving to Philadelphia.
The original invoice for when I sold my Mini (‘for spares or repair’)
I was a casual smoker at the time, and took a deep breath and decided to walk around the building a couple of times to clear my head of the phone call that’d just happened. I must have smoked two or three cigarettes in pretty quick succession, and all I had in my head was “this is it, this is it”. If I didn’t do it, I’d regret it for the rest of my life. I called Tim back twenty minutes later and told him I was in.
From there, it was a lot of back and forth between Tim, the hiring manager, QVC’s HR and Relocation departments, and some awkward conversations with my current managers. They were supportive, but they knew what was going on, even though all of us had to keep it as quiet as possible. But getting the job wasn’t a certainty. I’d have to go over to West Chester and interview, just like everybody else. So on Saturday September 8th 2001 I flew over to Philadelphia, and got picked up in the QVC limo service to stay at the Sheraton Great Valley in Frazer, a few miles down the road from work. I can still vividly picture the lobby bar. I interviewed with the HR manager on the Sunday afternoon, just casually chatting in the cafeteria, where I showed her my portfolio of work and walked her through what I was all about.
The Monday, September 10th, was spending time with the team, getting to know the culture a bit more, sitting in on some meetings, and generally just shadowing and observing. I don’t remember too much about what happened that day, as it was simply just a normal day. Normal of course, in comparison to what happened the following day.
Considering that I was really only there for introductions and to interview, being at QVC the morning of 9/11 was, like most other Americans, a completely surreal experience. As with many others, I remember exactly where I was when I saw the first plane hit. We’d just grabbed some cafeteria coffee, and were chatting in the cubicles, when someone yelled “Turn on CNN” at a little after 8.40am. From there, pretty much everything stopped, as everyone watched in horror as the morning’s events unfolded. We’d heard reports of planes coming down in Pennsylvania too, so were particularly worried about the attacks hitting large centers of commerce, like QVC. This was really before most of us had cell phones, and all the international lines were down. I was able to get a message through to England that we were OK via email, but only much later in the day. I remember the second plane hitting when I was upstairs in the live graphics studio, where the team were making the call about what to put on air to let QVC’s viewers know what was happening. I was also there when they made the slate announcing that QVC was temporarily off the air.
I don’t remember too much about the rest of that day, other than there was a lot of anger directed towards the Middle East, and having a burger as room service back in my hotel, and watching Jaws in order to just take a mental break from the blanket coverage most of the networks were then screening. Everyone’s heads were down, and you could feel the country changing overnight. One of the things I had to work through was how on earth I was going to get home. With all flights grounded for the foreseeable future, getting back to England as planned was definitely not going to happen. I was advised to only travel back when I was comfortable, which I most definitely was not.
I think I stayed for another week before flying back on the red eye to Heathrow, and I have never been more terrified during a flight. The guy next to me was trying to engage me in conversation about 9/11, and was reading the paper, which of course was still full of 9/11 pictures. Not helpful. I have never been so glad to see the grey, rainy, gloom of Heathrow airport.
As life back in London returned to normal after what had ended up being quite the journey, I waited to hear back from QVC as to if they wanted to move forward, which felt like it took for ages. But I got the call, and got the job, and then things started to accelerate. I accepted immediately, and the best thing I remember about it was that I’d been offered a relocation package, as of course I couldn’t bring over my car, any of my electrical items, and I had to now find somewhere to live. I’d built my team from scratch, and was good friends inside and outside of work with all of them. In many ways that was my first experience of what it really meant to have a great team, and something I’m proudest of during my time at QVC in London. It broke my heart when I had to tell them I was leaving. My leaving party was about as debauched as could be expected, but the VP of engineering told me that if things didn’t work out, that I could always come back and there’d be a home for me. That emotional safety net was incredibly important in the months to come, and always meant a great deal to me.
The interactive design team at QVC, circa 2001. A young team who worked hard, and played harder.
I went back over to Philadelphia again for a ‘relocation trip’ in early December, to sort out the immigration paperwork, find a place to live, and to generally figure everything out. I spent two days with a Realtor, who took me to several different neighborhoods in and around Philadelphia, got to know me a bit, and ultimately helped me find something almost identical to what I had in Richmond. I often wonder what happened to him. I don’t remember his name, but he did a phenomenal job of looking after me, and took almost all the stress out of the process. Little did I know but a few years later in New York I’d be spending a lot more time with Realtors.
So with everything sorted out, the visas in place, notice given on my beloved apartment in Richmond, my car sold, and all my electrical items sent back home to my parents’ house, it was time to pack. I didn’t really have many possessions - mainly just records, a few clothes, books and a small amount of furniture (most rental apartments in London come already furnished). I still have the desk I had when I lived in London, and I’m writing this on it today. The letting agent did the final inspection, and seemed to find dust in places where there had never historically been dust before, resulting in her being adamant that I’d not get my security deposit back. Thankfully I had a good relationship with my landlord, and had definitely looked after the place for her, so I got it back in full, with a nice note and her best wishes. Then it was off to spend the night in Brixton with my best friend, Andy, before an early start in the morning.
That night at the pub was a fairly sombre affair, as we knew we’d not really see much of each other after that. We reminisced about some of the more foolish times we’d had together, laughed a lot, drank a lot, and of course, went for a kebab afterwards. I don’t really remember sleeping that much that night, as the enormity of what was about to happen had only then begun to sink in.
The following morning it was time to go. I’d lived in other countries before, but this felt permanent almost before I got on the plane. We set off, and the only thing I really remember was that we got lost trying to find the place for departures, which caused me to get really nervous about potentially missing the flight. Of course, we were hours early though. My best friend had driven me, and another close friend from University was there to send me off. I cried. They cried. It all seemed so final. They told me many years later that they sat and had a coffee afterwards and told each other that I’d never be coming back. Thinking about that to this day makes me so sad.
Andy had made me a CD to listen to on the flight over. I still have it, and am listening to it as I type this to you. It was full of memories, which of course had me choking up, and with tears in my eyes for most of the flight. Some of it was new to me, but most of it deeply meant something. It was unmistakably all about us. The Wonderstuff, Radiohead, Thousand Yard Stare, Midnight Cowboy, Morrissey, it was all there, laid out with powerful emotional resonance. with each song I pictured a different set of memories of our time together. I felt such waves of regret about my choice as I listened to it, feeling so selfish for doing what I was doing. But I also knew that the world was getting smaller, and that the time we would have together in the future would be so much more meaningful. I’m glad I was right, but I miss him every day.
CD1: Fragments Of A Great Conversation
The Stranglers: Golden Brown
AC/DC: Highway To Hell
Thousand Yard Stare: Wideshire
The Wonderstuff: Here Comes Everyone
The Beach Boys: Hang On To Your Ego
The Small Faces: Rene
Nick Drake: River Man
Spear Of Destiny: World Service
Ryan Adams: To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)
Magazine: The Light Pours Out Of Me
John Barry: Theme From Midnight Cowboy
Fairport Convention: Who Knows Where The Time Goes
Morrissey: Every Day Is Like Sunday
Buffalo Springfield: For What It’s Worth
Ride: Like A Daydream
Small Faces: Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake
The Smashing Pumpkins: Disarm
Pixies: Here Comes Your Man
The Wonderstuff: That’s Entertainment
CD2: Hymns Inspired By A Beery Mistress
Михаил Шуфутинский: Пёрышки
Beck: Where It’s At
The Gypsy Kings: Hotel California
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: Little Demon
Radiohead: The Bends
The Beatles: Dear Prudence
The Who: The Seeker
Frank Black: Hang On To Your Ego
Captain Beefheart: Sure ‘Nuff N Yes I Do
David Bowie: Panic In Detroit
The Stone Roses: Waterfall
Primal Scream: Loaded
Blur: To The End
John Barry: Theme From Midnight Cowboy
Letta Mbulu: What’s Wrong With Groovin’
Them: It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
Van Halen: Why Can’t This Be Love
Frank Sinatra: Some Traveling Music
Kenny Rogers: Just Dropped In
I landed in Philadelphia, took a deep breath, got my papers stamped by immigration, and I was officially an immigrant. My family like to tell the story of me coming through Ellis Island, having my name changed, and carrying a small case while wearing a paperboy cap, but the reality was much less cinematic. I was picked up by my future boss, Jim, who was late, causing me to panic. But we headed out together to my new apartment to get the keys, which was empty except for a mattress that I’d managed to get delivered in advance. We then went for dinner together at the Copa Banana on South Street, after which Jim took me shopping. And when I say shopping, it was more like Supermarket Sweep.
QVC’s relocation package had afforded me the ability to replace all my household electrical items. So we went to Best Buy, and bought everything in one go. A new TV, stereo setup, stuff for the kitchen, and a bunch of other things. Then IKEA for a couch, a bed and other furniture. By the time he dropped me off with it all at the end of the night, I was exhausted. A day earlier I’d been drinking with my friends in a Brixton pub. Now here I was buying everything I could for my new apartment in Philadelphia, at an IKEA in Delaware. I slept on the mattress, curled up underneath my coat. I was here.
There’s so many stories that happened after that, and one day I’ll tell them all, but suffice to say as much as I loved, and continue to love Philadelphia, it was New York that came calling only a couple of years later. But after almost twenty years, I still have no regrets about the decision that naive 28 year old took after a couple of laps around the building and a few cigarettes. Living in America has allowed me to meet some incredible people, visit some spectacular places, finally find the right girl, have a family, buy a house, enjoy professional success and so much more. I often think what my life would have been if I’d not had the opportunity to come here, if I would have been as happy staying in London with my friends. I don’t miss London at all, and every time we visit, it just seems to get more and more apathetic and depressing. It’s expensive, and I’ve become very spoiled on the service-driven culture of living in America. I always think that I’m the one who left, which never sits well with me. While I don’t miss the city, I certainly miss my friends, some of which stay in touch, but most don’t - that’s just who they are and I can’t ever ask them to change. Most of us are family men now, settled down with kids that are growing up far too fast for our liking. When I hear from them it always makes my day.
As populism grows across the globe, there’s been a lot in the news over the past few years about immigration. I’m incredibly proud of my immigration story, and even prouder to call myself an immigrant. I came here to contribute, and the country and its people have repaid me hundreds of times over. I have so much to be grateful for, and I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.
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