Hello, who are you and where are you from? Tell us some amazing facts about your hometown!
Hey! My name is Neil Richardson, and I am originally from the East End of London. I moved out to a little village called Stock (founded in 1086, current population 800), in Essex. It’s got the quintessential village cricket green, a Post Office and five pubs within 100m of each other. In the summer it’s a cracking place to live! An amazing fact? One of the pubs in the village is called The Hoop and it has been serving up pints of lovely warm English ale since the 1500s.
For you Eurovision fans out there, Sam Ryder, who sang for the UK in this year’s competition, went to my old school.
Tell us what you do then!
I am a Trainer within the Learning and Development Team. My portfolio includes Induction Training and Internal Projects. These include online Probation Learning and the Allambi Support Hub (ASH) development.
How did you end up here?
In Australia? Well, I met this young lady from Newy who was backpacking around Great Britain with her mates, and she ended up in my office in the City of London’s business district working on my team one day and... Oh, you mean Allambi?!
It’s an interesting tale, where all the planets were aligned. I went back to Essex for a holiday six years ago and one of my best mates had given up a high-flying role in stockbroking to help assist London’s homeless people, making sure they were safe each night. His shift started at 1am every day. He took a massive pay cut but didn’t care as he loved it. Then a few weeks later it was Father’s Day and our house was broken into; I had a couple of expensive bikes stolen, as well as my Father’s Day craft beer stash! I was interested in what had made the young lad (who was eventually caught) do it, what had brought him to this point of his life. Then I was on a craft beer tour the following week, as a guest of a publication I write for, and I met a Support Worker from Allambi. He told me how much he enjoyed going to work each day and I thought, ‘that sounds right up my alley.’ I mean, who doesn’t want to enjoy going to work?! And here I am! I’ve never looked back, to be honest.
What makes you hop out of bed each morning, with a smile on your face, knowing you are coming to work?
Every day is something new, however, I bloody love Induction Week! I get to meet all the amazing new Support Workers, who want to walk the path I have. I guess I am so passionate as I have seen how it is possible to help change someone’s life for good. I know it works. It’s not some Ponzi Scheme, you can make a difference. Adrian Russell and I tell the new crew on a Monday morning all about the Allambi Family and how we all have the Allambi tattoo, and it really is a bit like that, isn’t it?! You just get it. That’s why we are all here.
What has been your post-COVID guilty pleasure?
I am in two bands – I play percussion – and music is in my blood. My old man was a professional jazz drummer, so I have been around drums all my life. I am in a folk band called The Raggle Taggle Gypsies with my colleague and mate, Mark “Robbo” Robinson and we are pretty good if I do say so myself! COVID killed off our gigs and we missed the buzz. The saddest night of the COVID era was turning up to an empty venue on Christmas Eve (which pre-COVID was packed) where there was not one person in the bar. We sat outside on a bus stop bench, playing a few tunes to see if we could attract a few punters, but the streets of Newcastle were dead and all we got were tumbleweeds, so we went home. It’s all picking up again now and our last gig was back to full throttle. It was great fun.
If we gave you $10K to go on a trip somewhere on the planet, where would you like to travel and why?
Muscat, Oman. I went there in 1996 as a young lad when my mate was helping set up a 5 Star Hotel. It was such a beautiful country, with beautiful people and totally untouched by western businesses. There were, thankfully, no golden arches in the country and the government refused their existence. I spent a wonderful two weeks there over the New Year, talking to the ex-pats who had come to build the country’s infrastructure and spent hours talking to an American fella and a very posh English lady, mostly about nonsense. The next day I found out he was the American Ambassador, and she ran MI6 for the British government. There I am talking about football, beer, and cracking rubbish jokes! Highlight was sitting in the Gulf of Oman, up to my neck, to cool down from the 56C temperature. It was like being in a bath.
Which piece of advice given to you, have you managed to stick to in life?
My old man always said, “If you want to be somewhere in life, you will always make sure you get there.” I hold both myself and others accountable for this. If you truly want to do something, you will pull out all the stops to do so. When people make excuses, I am “meh, they don’t want to do it.”
How can we contact you?
You can pop in and say hello to me in my Harry Potter cupboard more or less under the stairs to the Mezzanine or email me at Neil.Richardson@allambicare.org.au
