Person of interest

Dear all, thank you for welcoming me to the team. Even though I’m working remotely, I’ve just spent a couple of days in Bournemouth when I had the chance to meet many of you and also see some of the highlights of this lovely seaside town. I’m sure I’ll be back at some point, but until then, here’s a quick rundown about me. 

I won’t list all my jobs as this would be quite boring, but I am giving you some background just so you know where I come from. My first salaried job was at the age of 11 when a national daily printed my silly drawing of some ants standing on a railway line. I went back to journalism later, but none of my drawings made it to print after that. 

Life in Hungary

I grew up in our family business in Hungary where I learned the basics of traditional marketing. My father is a chemical engineer / inventor, and he invented an active ingredient, originally intended to stop diarrhoea in farm animals. The business was built around this product and over the years we discovered additional health benefits. We developed many shapes and forms for it, adapted for specific animals, such as fish and bees. And we even discovered new uses, including human: a customer gave it to his daughter who had digestion problems and then she started to sneak into the pantry and decimate the snacks. 

After secondary school, I went to a two-year bilingual advanced level programming course. I’ve never been a programmer, but this gave me a good technical background which would become handy later in SEO, where going into some CSS or JavaScript code doesn’t frighten me.

Then I went to the University of Szeged, where a famous Hungarian journalist was running a 5-year communications course and it was kind of popular at that time. My future wife was one of my hundreds of classmates, but as it usually is, we never spoke too much with each other during uni years. It was only a few months after graduation when we started to go out.

In the last few years of the uni, I worked as a journalist at a weekly, writing in the Lifestyle section about cars, gadgets, books and anything that could be classified as lifestyle.

We had only been dating for a few weeks, when she suggested we go to London. Some of our friends had spent a few months or years there, but not too many of them stayed. I had two choices: stay in Hungary or go with her. As they say, long distance relationships bring you closer – to the person who is close to you 🙂 So obviously I went with her.

Life in the UK

After a few years at shitty hotel jobs and awful house shares, I found my first SEO job at Kaplan International. They needed someone to create the Hungarian version of the site, and do the SEO. I didn’t know anything about SEO, but I got the job thanks to my background in journalism and marketing. This is where I learned the basics of online marketing.

Soon after that we lived in Stevenage for 3 years and then we moved to Malta where we spent a year. 

After we moved back to London and got married, she started to be interested in making silver jewellery with sea glass. It was a well-kept secret at the time, that one of the world’s best sea glass beaches is located at the Durham coast, North East of England.

So we started to come up here for short breaks, weekends and we always stayed with the same host, in various properties. The house where we live now had been tenanted, and became an Airbnb in 2018. The owner had already sold it, but the buyer backed out as they wanted it for an investment.

And this was when we started considering buying it, and a few months later it was ours! So we’ve lived here since then, for more than 3 years. The beach is much busier now, as a local jeweller told the secret to BBC’s Countryfile programme, so hundreds of people come here daily. Since then, we’ve been going at night, when only a few other people are there.

And one last personal addition: I like travelling, going to pubs, concerts and cinema. During the pandemic, while it was not possible to do any of those, I started to build crazy cities virtually, thanks to game developers. You can see some videos of my crazy cities in this YouTube playlist.