"I’m almost formerly a Canadian. I’ll give up my Canadian citizenship later this year. I’ve been here for seven years next month and my visa is now at a stage where I’m eligible to take UK citizenship and I’m really looking forward to it. I love it here.
"I came here initially with Whole Foods Market and worked in their store in Giffnock, but I got laid off after a couple of months, but that was okay, I fell back into hospitality work running restaurants and bars, so it wasn’t painful.
"I’m doing my apprenticeship in hairdressing and barbering one day a week and I run a café four days a week. I’m hoping to start up a shared space social enterprise barber shop and hairdressers. Depending on how big the space I get is, my plan is for it to grow into other things, with other parts to it that fit in with the ethos of the whole thing.
"But the premise is to open initially as a cafe and hairdressers and offer free haircuts to people who need them, and the rest will work on a, ‘pay what you decide/if you can’ basis.
" We’d like to do things like offer people who are trying to get back into work, haircuts before they go for a job interview and if we do well enough, we’d like to be able to offer to cover their travel expenses to get to us, and give them a confidence boost as well as a hair cut and tea and coffee when they come in.
"I’m pretty sure the social enterprise is going to be called MOP, which stands for, ‘Most Interesting Pseudonym’, and then we can have different names for the different sections that we’ll have within it. If that goes well then I’d like to start a charity that helps people to buy their first house. I’ve been looking into how all of that would work.
"I do a bunch of other stuff as well. I write poetry and I work on a series of novels that I’ve been writing forever. I see my life as having a lot of roads within it. With everything that I do, whatever road I’m moving on, I’m happy working on the basis, that when it happens, it happens."
