Preamble

"You don't have to be born in New Orleans to live here, New Orleans can be born in you."  

These words drawled out from our dismayingly rotund tour guide whilst a group of us stood  panting in the searing summer heat of the city. It was September 2016 and about as hot and unrelenting a day as you get in the South. As I digested her words, I found  myself thinking of a moment almost six months previously.  

I was at a friend's house party in London in when  abruptly exclaimed, without any prior murmurings, that I was going to move from London to New Orleans by the end of the year. Understandably this was met with a rather deflating mixture of disinterest and general concern for my state of mind. In fact, I was the most confounded person in the room having given no prior thought to this endeavour. It was as though the idea had somehow belly crawled into my mind, buried itself deep in my subconscious and then let itself quietly slip out as if only to amuse only itself.  

There were a few tacitly encouraging voices that night. But mostly I could tell that they were doing their best to humour me and thought I should probably lay off the hooch. For some time the idea quietly fermented in my mind and little more came of it.  

Then in July of that year I was seized by it again in San Sebastian, in northern Spain. I had just run with the bulls at the San Fermin festival in Pamplona and was in something of a frazzled state of mind. By this point in my life I had become almost completely disengaged with my job in a bank and feeling all too aware that life was due for a more seismic change of scenery.  

It made some sense to actually visit the place first so I parked myself in a café and planned a road trip at the end of August that would start in New York and take me to New Orleans and back again. Needless to say, I fell quite hard for NOLA almost as soon as I arrived and began scoping out potential employers once I'd gotten home. Through a good deal of fortune and many hours of trawling LinkedIn on my work PC, I found a company that was helping fund social enterprises in the city and made enquiries.  

I'll fill you in on my work here in future entries but suffice it to say that they were kind enough give me a shot at working with them on a new project. My contact stressed that there was no guaranteed offer of full time employment and that I was likely to be helping them out pro bono initially and then offered a more permanent contract if I turned out to be worth my salt. But this was good enough for me and with little pause, I jauntily handed in my notice.  

I'll never fully understand what it was that spawned the idea in my mind that evening. But I'll be eternally grateful for it. Perhaps our tour guide was right. There is a kind of pull from this city that feels transcendental and unknowable. Either way, I'm here now. So I suppose it's time to roll my sleeves up and get on with it.