The Man Who Showed Me the World

The world below is a map of ghosts. I am suspended somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow, on a long-haul flight to Zurich. In that city, seventy people await, ready for a seminar on how to build a life in Switzerland—a life like mine. But my mind is not on the seminar. It is on a different Zurich, a different lifetime, and the man who first drew the map for me.

A Childhood Without Maps

I grew up in a world sealed not by walls, but by horizons. My childhood was a careful, academic, and loving construction, built by teachers, engineers, and architects. They could explain the laws of physics and recite Schiller by heart, but the world beyond Germany’s borders was a blank page. No one I knew had ever truly left. A classmate moving to another Bundesland was a Columbus for our times.

It wasn't that my family was provincial; they were cultured, book-filled, and solidly middle-class. We had opinions, but we didn’t have passports that begged to be stamped. Whispers existed, of course—family ghosts who had ventured out. Two of my father’s uncles had vanished to Chile after the war; one found fortune, the other returned cloaked in failure. An uncle on my mother’s side built a driving school in Toronto. But these were fables, cautionary tales, not invitations.

My father once touched America in the Reagan years. He returned thunderstruck, speaking in a new language of highways and impossible steaks. A job offer materialized, a brief, dazzling crack in the wall of our sensible life. But my mother would not have it. The door shut. Life returned to its predictable, a life drawn in pencil within ruled lines. Even as a boy, a quiet question formed in my mind: How can you see America and just come back?

Years later, when I met my fiancée, Amy, it felt like entering a parallel reality. Her background was similar, yet her family operated on a different default setting. Relatives who moved abroad after the war remained connected by letters and trans-oceanic reunions. Her siblings worked in places like Australia; her friends were scattered across New Zealand, Singapore, and Dubai, and they all kept in touch. Her parents had traveled together, something mine never did. I often wondered if this was something uniquely British—a cultural reminiscence of Empire, perhaps? A subconscious feeling that you still owned the world? Amy grew up with motion in her bones. And I remember thinking: It wasn't about money or luck; it was simply a world where borders were porous.

The Man on Konradstrasse

And then, on a Tuesday in May 1999, the world cracked open for good. The door was an office on Konradstrasse in Zurich, for my first day at PwC. It was the day I began speaking English at work, and the day the architect of my future walked in.

His name was Mike C.

He was British, a caricature and a king. He wore English suits, Grenson shoes, and smiled with famously bad teeth. We were assigned a two-desk office where you could still smoke indoors. I lit a Benson & Hedges. He nodded, a wry spark in his eye. “Good man,” he said. That was the beginning of everything.

The Gospel According to Mike

Mike was about twenty years older than me, and at first we had little in common. But we started talking. Then really talking—over long lunches, always with rosé wine, and the bitter smoke of shared melancholy.

He was a man of stories.

He told me of his time at PwC in London, where he was tasked with getting rid of their outdated IT equipment. “I made a handy sum off the gold in the motherboards,” he said. He even claimed to have once sold company secrets to the Financial Times, triggering a scandal.

Tall tales? Perhaps. But he told them beautifully, painting pictures of his past with Andersen Consulting in France, a publisher in New York, and a life in a villa with a pool in the South of France.

It was during one of these lunches that I finally confided in him a secret ambition of my own: I had long dreamt of living in London. I was hesitant, my mind a tangle of overwhelming questions—How could I find work? Where would I possibly live? I loved the idea but couldn't think straight, lost in the fog of my own uncertainty.

Mike just smiled, leaned in, and made it all sound so simple. He cut through my confusion with the casual confidence of a man who had walked the path a dozen times.

He told me exactly how to become a freelancer in London, what rates to expect, and how to set up a limited company to pay minimal tax. It wasn't just encouragement; it was a practical, step-by-step map out of my hesitation and into the life I had only dared to imagine.

He explained the unwritten rules of the international man in London, sketching out a new reality for me:

For property, West is best.

You fly EasyJet for convenience, but know when the moment demands the Savoy.

You never read The Guardian; you read The Telegraph.

You don't take the Tube; you call a black cab.

He knew the best of everything:

Pimlico Plumbers for emergencies,

Holland Park for a Sunday stroll,

Davidoff Magnum Supreme Virginia for a proper cigarette,

and an essential, handmade umbrella from James Smith & Sons. And above all: if you have any pride, you never send your kids to state school.

I didn’t just absorb it. I memorized it. It was like discovering the blueprint to a hidden world—and realizing it was real.

A Life of Beautiful Contradictions

But his lessons weren't just about business and logistics. They were about how to live. Mike drank too much. He had just been through a painful divorce. But he loved life ferociously. He introduced me to Pomerol, one night over dinner. That rich, velvety Bordeaux—it tasted like power, like velvet, like a secret.

Despite making good money, he always spent it all. Rarely was anything left at the end of the month. But when funds did come in, he would announce he was "back in funds"—and celebrate with a glass of champagne.

His life was a series of grand gestures.

He introduced me to proper picnic hampers, and once, we went to the F1 race at Silverstone in his Jaguar. The night before, we popped into Harrods Food Halls, filled our hamper with champagne and lobster salad, and drove out of London.

The next day we sat on a grassy knoll, sipping bubbles and eating cold shellfish while cars screamed past in the distance. Glorious.

Another year, we took the sleeper train from Zurich to Barcelona for another Grand Prix. Then there were the VIP tickets for Spa.

Through all this merry chaos, his devotion to his daughter Phoebe was his anchor. He got her into the best private schools in London, despite serious money issues. She is a lawyer now, a fact that moves me every time I think of it. He was a wreck and a hero, all at once. I named my own daughter Phoebe—in part—after his.

This duality defined him. When Mike left Zurich, he had almost made enough to buy that Jaguar XK8 convertible in cash. Almost. “Barclays had to top me up a bit,” he winked. He withdrew 120,000 Swiss francs in banknotes, took the train to Berlin, and drove the car back himself. He loved that car—but when money ran low, he had to pawn it a few times. Eventually, he sold it entirely, for the most noble of reasons: to pay for Phoebe’s school fees.

His very house was a paradox. He owned a dilapidated home in Vézelay, France—a medieval hilltop town in Burgundy, once a pilgrim’s stop on the Camino de Santiago. Golden light, Romanesque arches, wild vines through shattered shutters. His house there was collapsing, and somehow perfect. It was in Vézelay, in that town of sacred ruins, that I had my first Michelin-starred meal, at Marc Meneau’s L’Espérance. We ate pigeon. I’ll never forget it. The hush of the room, the reverence, the wine. It was more than dinner. It was a ritual of arrival.

A Life According to Mike

Four years later, I was living in London—not just visiting. Living. I got my job at Allianz through Mike’s agent Mark. I slept on the couch of another Mike, a friend of Mike C’s, in Honor Oak Park until I got my first pay. He was between projects, smoked weed, and played video games all day. It was he who ordered Indian takeaway at 10pm every night. The whole experience was chaotic, new, and utterly liberating.

In 2008, I moved to Miami—and Mike C came with me for a 10-day scouting trip. We drove through Coral Gables, looked at houses, argued politics, drank whiskey, and made plans. He hated the heat, but loved the vibe.

He taught me one last lesson in the art of the game. Mike had a habit of recycling limited companies. He’d open one, close another. “Never make it too easy for the tax man,” he’d grin. His last company before he passed? Old Blighty Ltd. My dear Old Blighty, indeed.

Cirrhosis, Ghosts, and Goodbyes

Eventually, the drink caught up with him.

Cirrhosis. Then liver cancer. He received a transplant. He didn’t stop drinking. I visited him in hospital. He was gaunt, but still full of fire. Quoting Cicero. Complaining about the NHS. Reminiscing about good cabbies in West London.

He died a few years later.

When the call came, it felt like a curtain falling on the second act of my life.

Looking Back from the Sky

Now, on this plane to Zurich, about to teach others how to build a life abroad, my thoughts drift.

To Konradstrasse. To Vézelay. To Pomerol. To picnic hampers on a grassy hill in Silverstone.

To the man who made me love Britain—its contradictions, its elegance, its rain—and who, perhaps, made it possible that I would one day meet the love of my life there.

Every Man Needs a Mike C

He didn’t give me permission.

He gave me possibility.

And in a world that constantly tries to shrink you—into borders, into fear, into caution—that is the most radical thing a man can offer another.

So this is for Mike C:

The man who told me never to read The Guardian.

The man who knew that rosé was a meal.

The man who believed in tailored suits and messy lives.

The man whose fingerprints are all over my freedom.

May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

And may every young man sitting in a Zurich office today, smoking a cigarette and wondering what comes next, find his Mike.

Before it’s too late.