Cocaine, class and me: everyone in this town takes drugs, all the time – they’re part of the civic culture
A man walks into a chicken shop. This sounds like the beginning of a joke. Perhaps it is. For 18 months, I have worked in a chicken shop, and some days my situation feels like a punchline. In 2015, I quit my job at a property magazine in London and moved to Aberdeen, with two suitcases and a grand plan to write a book about the oil industry. Two years later, I washed up in a northern refinery town, with no money and an unfinished manuscript. I learned my scale. I got a job frying things.