I got my first TV gig thanks to OE

Not that my experience wasn’t interesting. I arrived on a Saturday in March after my first international flight and popped out of The Tube to find the world had gone completely mad. That day, 200,000 people had packed themselves into Trafalgar Square and gone on a rampage, destroying the centre of London in an orgy of protest known as the Poll Tax Riots. Crunching over broken glass was a heck of a way for an Antipodean un-sophisticate to arrive in Thatcher’s England.

And although I never did run with the bulls at Pamplona, was never stained juice-red at La Tomatina or had to be carried out of Oktoberfest, I did have some experiences. I was abandoned at the end of a Military Ball in northern England, for example, when my ‘‘mates’’ took off back to London without me. This was well before social media and, when I made it home two days later, my flatties were only just starting to worry.

A friend and I saved the life of a toddler who fell onto the tracks at a U-Bahn station in Munich. I lived on the top-floor of a swank townhouse in Belgravia for three months, with a housekeeper to do my washing. After that, in a hovel of a mewshouse with three disgustingly messy boys who left me to clean up for them.

I also got my first job in television in London, through a chance meeting in a pub, in a moment that changed my life. Three months into my stay, I’d run out of savings and things were looking desperate. The head of the TV production house I buttonholed at the Crown and Sceptre in Foley St wanted a television writer and I convinced him to take me on by offering to work for free for the first few weeks.

A month later I was Europe correspondent for a Taiwanese network, covering the first Gulf War.

I don’t think things happen like that any more but the OE, no matter what it now looks like, is still an important part of some Kiwis’ growing up.

It’s this generation of New Zealanders – the ones who have had to come home as the world shut down – I feel for. Since 1993 you haven’t been able to add time spent out of the UK to the length of your visa and the UK has no plans to freeze the remaining time of those who have come home.

I know the mid-life OE is a thing and plenty leave travels until later, but there’s no replacing a few years in your early 20s when you’re truly free and life’s rolled out, unmarked and pristine, before you.

No wonder some of them feel a little cheated right now.