About me.
I spent my childhood in South London in the ‘90s, back when school fads revolved around Game Boys, Pokemon, tamagotchis and Pogs. Throughout school I was pretty good at English Literature, alright at Business Studies and firmly below average at maths, science, German and drama. I knew I was below average at drama because, cast as Boxer the Cart-Horse in Animal Farm age 17, I performed a gasping, twitchy death scene on stage. It was so over-the-top that the audience were stunned into silence and instead of applause all I could hear was my mum guffawing uncontrollably into her handbag.
Ever since I was small I’d wanted to be a writer, but after four years studying American and English Literature at UEA, the first job I landed was in PR for a curtain company. Although I liked my team and enjoyed meeting interior design journalists, I spent most of the time looking forward to the day being over and the weekend to come. After a year I moved from interiors PR to in-house PR at a design agency, which I truly loved. It was fast-paced and creative and niche. We worked with Adidas and Hamley’s and Dell and everybody wore Vans and skinny jeans and Palace T-shirts. We’d go to the pub past closing every Thursday and be sat at our desks by 9am Friday, zombie-like and triumphant, living embodiments of the old London mantra: work hard, play hard.
After two years it was time for a change so I moved to a consumer PR Agency in Farringdon where I spent six months coming fully to terms with the fact that in no way, shape or form is PR something I want to do.
In 2016, feeling a little lost and unsure, I decided to leave London and move to Berlin – a city where it’s okay to not know. I’d been in Berlin for about three months when I started to write for the first time since I was a child. I wrote a blog post about the reality of moving country, and when I finished I felt like I could burst with happiness. I’d communicated my experiences in exactly the way I’d wanted and now the people I cared about could experience this with me. Along with the joy, I felt utterly complete.
For the first 15 months living in Berlin I worked as a marketing manager at a voucher company. The first six months were chill. Honestly, I didn’t have much work to do. I’d get in at 9:30, take long breaks, play lots of kicker and get all of my work done by 5pm with time to spare.
Then management introduced a time-tracking system. As soon as we arrived at the office and sat at our desks we’d have to press play on some software. We’d have to be physically at our desks for eight hours a day, and we’d have to pause the software when we went for lunch, played kicker and left the office.
This was bad. I had about two hours of work to do each day and was left with six excruciating hours to fill. But when life gives you lemons…
I used those spare six hours to build and launch an online publication. A place where I could publish my writing and a platform for other amateur writers to publish theirs. I would be the editor of the publication, and every piece of writing on there would be about real life experiences – stories that are relatable, that make other people feel good. It would be a reaction to the alienating nature of social media – we’d share the bad, the funny, the embarrassing. The name came to me on my way to the gym one day. It would be called No Filter.
I won’t go into detail, but No Filter got me fired. I applied for other full-time jobs in marketing but I knew I didn’t want one. Feeling lost once again, I trained for a month to learn how to teach English as a second language, but after a full hour sitting in a classroom in east Berlin being ridiculed by a gang of German kids, I knew for certain that teaching was not my bag. But then the owner of the school asked me to help her with a marketing strategy. So I did, and I realised then I could use all of the skills I’d learned over the years to freelance on my terms.
I started with my favourite companies. I used the creativity I learnt in my design agency to brainstorm marketing concepts. I used the pitching skills I’d learnt through PR to set up meetings and build presentations. I used the writing skills I was honing with No Filter to write creative, engaging content. And, almost two years later, I now work as a full-time freelance writer. I write a weekly blog series for Urban Sports Club. I write travel essays for Babbel Magazine and The Culture Trip and I work as a music journalist, writing about nightlife and club culture for Mixmag and Huck.
I travel at least twice a month to different cities to find out about its night culture. This year I’ve been to Amsterdam, Brussels, Tel Aviv, Marseille, Lisbon and Belfast amongst others. I meet the promoters and the DJs and the producers and find out what makes that place unique, then I spend a lot of time sitting at my desk in my flat in Kreuzberg, transcribing our interviews and piecing together the fragments of information that best convey my experience. Sometimes, when I’m on these trips – perhaps waiting at the airport or on my way to the nightclub or having dinner with the artists – I feel so excited and grateful that it hurts my chest. But the bit I love the most is when the party is over and I’m sitting at my desk in Kreuzberg, piecing together the fragments and writing it down on the page so that you can experience it too.
– Alice Austin
