Just over five years ago, I quit my job on morale grounds.

My boss had turned out to be not only useless but also a terrible person and I couldn't carry on working there in good conscience.

Instead, I would establish myself as a freelancer, be my own man and sail the winds of freedom.

This was single handedly the worst decision of my life, which is quite an achievement as I was already an internationally renown professional bad decision maker.

I hadn't anticipated all the difficulties I encountered. Almost a decade in a comfortable small-ish family run company had prepared me for nothing. This was really life and freelancing lasted six months.

Just in time for the pandemic.

Because we had a newborn and I was supposed to work from home, it had been already decided that I would be responsible for childcare, at least until our youngest could go to school. It would save a fair bit of money that way.

With the first lockdown, this situation became all the more too real. I was now with four kids at home and not generating any income. My wife, being a frontline worker and sole bread earner, carried on like a trooper, trooping.

Unfortunately, this is when everything started to slowly fall apart. My financial situation quickly became “our” financial disarray, putting a tremendous strain on our relationship and eventually chattering it seemingly beyond repair. My mental health was lost, at some point, amidst all of this...

I became a fulltime homemaker, as they seem to say nowadays, and performed my duties of care as well as could while trying to create a “bit on the side” - art, design, selling the occasional T-shirt, etc.

Nothing worked. Short of handouts from extraordinary people, no money came my way, and, barely covering my debts, I remained penniless.

We jump to January 2024..

Surely, everything would change! My baby had turned four in December and was starting school and therefore I could look for a job, any job!

Except... except that it's not easy job hunting, is it? They're elusive, jobs...

It turned out, no-one wants to employ a 50yo French idiot. Even application to jobs I knew inside out, with bags of experience, were received with a big fat no. Even position you can perform with half a brain, it was still NO.

Fine. If nobody wants to give a job, I have to create my own.

This is exactly what brings us here.

I would like to kindly ask for your help to establish a small business of furniture upcycling and restoration.

To take some useless junk and to transform it into differently useless junk, but that I would sell! (online and in my local community)

The money will be used in order:

To consolidate my financial situation. I have been at the bottom of my overdraft for almost a year. Any money I ever generated in that period went towards the bank fees. The resulting crippling anxiety parallelised me into inaction for too long now, this has to stop.

Then, the best part of the funds will be invested in a proper workbench (for the time being, I work of the floor or on table corners, etc. this is not the level of professionalism I want to achieve), I need a vice (who said I already had enough of these?!), some decent clamps (not nipple ones) and a sander (nipple one*). For the rest, I'm pretty much set. I already have most of the equipment, tones of material and projects, antiques to refurb, etc.

What I lack, is room to breathe. Would you help?

If you are in a position that allows you and are willing to help, my family and I will be for ever grateful.

I'll try to organise something for every non anonymous donors.

Thank you, diolch, merci.

*this is obviously a joke!