Visual Podcast-The years before working abroad as a volunteer in Sudan

Mustafa: Hello darling!
Tobias: Hi!
Mustafa: Why don’t you start by telling me what we are talking about today?
Tobias: We’ll be looking at some of the experiences I’ve had in my life through my travels, my work, and my personal interests. Also, some bits about how it all came about with my earlier experiences when I was growing up which made me later decide that I wanted to do some international travel. This culminated in a career of about 30 years working in cultural relations.

Mustafa: That will of course relate to an international aspect to your experience which took place in many different cultures across borders. The fact that you’re gay and how that worked in different communities is probably of particular interest. You ended up doing quite some work in the art scene, having started out focusing solely on education. Let’s start out right. Tell me about your hobbies.
Tobias: Well, living in all these places I started to collect mementos. People write diaries and take photographs. I started collecting paintings: each of them had a story behind it and an artist whom I knew. I knew where I got a piece of art and why. I knew about the background of each piece, and over the years I ended up with probably 70 or 80 different paintings which are displayed in my homes in the Netherlands as well as my houses in the UK.

Mustafa: That was the first thing that drew me to you when we first met and I visited your place. A beautiful collection indeed and we shall take a few pictures of them for the purpose of this interview. So, let’s start from the beginning. Tell me about the circumstances around your birth and your family.
Tobias: I was born in 1963 in quite an elegant suburb of London called Claygate. My father ran a family business in the meat packaging industry which was a very successful business at the time. My mother was a housewife. It was a wealthy environment that I was born in, however in the 1970s things got economically more difficult and my family underwent a shift in their socioeconomic status. The family business was taken over by a larger company and they wanted my dad to move to Kent in Southeast England. My late father did not care for the idea of working for a higher authority which made such
decisions for him, so my parents decided to opt out of the ‘rat-race in the champagne belt.’ It was trendy in the 70s, you see, the idea of self-sufficiency and making a life independently out of the Earth, so my family sold up and acquired a little farm in the middle of nowhere in a village in Cornwall in the Southwest of England.

Mustafa: I understand that moving the family into a farming lifestyle was a conscious decision on the part of your parents, rather than being dictated by the financial situation?
Tobias: The economy had indeed changed. As I said there were other options on the table, but moving to Cornwall to lead a simpler life was what my parents chose to do.

Mustafa: How old were you at the time?
Tobias: I was 7.

Mustafa: I imagine that must have been quite an adjustment for a child of that age. Did it effect your early education?
Tobias: Yeah, Yeah. I had to change schools. In London I attended a primary school which used to be quite eclectic, developed, and forward-thinking. Now I found myself in sort-of a ‘victorian’ small village school. My education was set back by a couple of years because I was placed in a higher grade which I had to repeat the next year, as I had learned more having attended the other school in London. I felt like I was the odd one out and I found it very difficult. I had no idea what country life was all about. Finding out that milk came from cows was a shock to me as I had always thought of milk as coming in glass bottles. I had never seen a tractor before. I didn’t know that a tractor’s exhaust pipe was on top as I had always thought of exhaust pipes as being at the bottom of cars and vehicles as such. One time I tried climbing a tractor and held on to a scalding hot exhaust pipe without knowing what it was. This led to extremely bad burns that took a long time to heal.

Mustafa: Such a shock for a 7-year-old born into the upper echelons of urban society to find himself in such an alien environment. It sounds like you went to a school in London where more individual attention would have been paid to a child to cultivate what you might prosper at doing. Then you found yourself in a standard school where education had been pre-packaged for all. I guess you felt like you didn’t belong.

Tobias: That’s correct. I felt like I didn’t belong at all. London had been so cosmopolitan and there was just a sea of different people from diverse walks of life. The village in Cornwall was very small and quiet. There were so few people, maybe 3 other people my age. That was in stark contrast to how I had many friends my age in Claygate. Also, there was an aspect of linguistic alienation because at that age I found it difficult to assimilate the difference in accent.

Mustafa: Might you say that your experience as a child played into your decision later in life to choose a nomadic life?

Tobias: I think it particularly affected my decision in where I decided to go to university. When I graduated from secondary school, in those days the government would offer a study grant with the choice of going anywhere. Nowadays one usually goes to the nearest university because it is cheaper to live at home, but not in those days. I decided to go to the furthest place I could find, which ended up being York in the North of England. At that time, that would have been a 12-hour bus ride away.

I spent 4 years in York doing a degree in history and linguistics. It was fantastic. York was very genteel, very historic. Where I live at the moment in Holland actually is reminiscent of that character. Beautiful architecture and a nice café culture. Some undercurrents of complexity going on and overall just a nice character. Also, with much water around. The canals here in Holland remind me of the rivers in York.

I do think that moving to Cornwall as a child and experiencing that difference kind of made it stay in my mind that there was something more to look for beyond one’s immediate environment.

Mustafa: So, after university you decided to go abroad. You already had a history that encouraged the idea that there was always something beyond the horizon for you to experience.

Tobias: Yes, I would say that.
Mustafa: How old were you when you consciously decided to go abroad?
Tobias: I was 22. I had just graduated with my bachelor degree.