The Place I Wasn’t Looking For

At the time, I was not working and I did not have a clear project.

I was in that suspended phase of life when you keep saying you are looking for inspiration, although what it often really means is that you still have no idea where to begin.

I was not completely unhappy.

I was not at peace either.

I was waiting for something.

The problem was that I did not know what.

One weekend, with my partner at the time, I went to visit friends in a small medieval town in Kent.

Walking along the high street, I noticed a shop for rent.

It was not the sign in the window that stopped me.

It was the place itself.

It was an old grocery shop, protected, almost intact: wooden counters, scales, tea bins, marble, a large display cabinet with a clock at its centre.

The rent was six hundred pounds a month.

It sounded almost like a typo spoken aloud.

I looked through the glass and, before I had any sensible plan, I could already see bottles on the shelves, tables, people staying longer than they intended.

“I want it.”

“For what?”

“A wine bar.”

My partner, an interior designer, could already see the complications.

I could see the bottles.

There would be licences, permissions, paperwork, restrictions on what could be altered in a listed building.

Bureaucracy has a remarkable talent for turning destiny into a form that must be completed in triplicate.

We applied anyway.

His help was substantial. He understood procedures I did not understand, helped with the interior and gave shape to the space.

But the decision, the investment and the risk were mine.

Not feeling ready

There is an idea we carry for years: first you become ready, then you begin.

Life often works in the opposite order.

Sometimes you begin and then you learn.

Sometimes you accept responsibility and only afterwards discover that you can carry it.

Sometimes experience is not the requirement for entering. It is what you build after you have entered.

I knew almost nothing about wine professionally.

So I studied.

I tasted.

I learnt producers, regions, vintages, mistakes.

I did not need to pretend I had expertise. I needed to build it.

Experience cannot be invented.

It has to be lived through.

The question I kept returning to was simple:

If I were the customer, how would I want to feel here?

That became more useful than pretending to know everything.

Permission to exist

At one point the place existed before the final permission to operate did.

That is a strange stage for a project: real enough to cost money, not yet real enough for everybody else to accept it.

Opinions arrived.

Letters arrived.

Objections arrived.

It is a curious thing: while a dream remains private, nobody can reject it. The moment you begin building it, committees, opinions and people convinced they know better what should exist suddenly appear.

Eventually there was a council hearing.

Then the sentence arrived:

The licence is granted.

We opened that same evening.

People queued.

For a while, everything looked like proof that the reckless idea had been right.

The wrong proof

For years, I believed worth was something that had to be demonstrated.

As though somewhere there were an invisible jury and life were one long hearing in which we presented evidence in our defence.

A successful business can look like perfect evidence.

Look: I did it. Therefore I am worth something.

But that is the wrong lesson.

The success of The Vinarium did not give me worth. It gave me something far more useful.

It taught me that I could trust myself.

I could not know something and learn it.

I could be afraid and continue.

I could ask for help without becoming less independent.

I could build something from almost nothing.

If we use results to prove our worth, every new result becomes another exam.

If instead we learn to trust ourselves, we do not have to win every time.

The redemption was not success. It was discovering that I could trust myself.

A door can appear in front of us.

It does not force us to walk through it.

And it certainly does not promise that everything on the other side will go well.

I opened that door without being ready.

Then I became ready enough to stay inside.

What remains now is not a medal to produce when someone doubts me.

It is an internal memory.

I know I can learn, because once I did not know how to do it then either.