# Riva talks to Tom
### Interview #1
I first met Tom almost five years ago, we were both new hires at a bar in Leeds which we worked at together for a whole summer. Tom stayed on whilst I left for London, returning intermittently to Leeds throughout my degree. Throughout the years he worked his way up, sideways, and in and out of management positions at some of Leeds’ most vibrant culture and hospitality spaces, whilst immersing himself in the hospitable, independently-minded community Leeds offers, particularly to those who work hard to cultivate and sustain it.
We maintained a friendship through brief visits and Facebook messenger, assisted by a shared deep abiding love for American teen series, The O.C. — We worked briefly together again in the autumn of 2018. Shortly after, I left for Israel whilst Tom and his girlfriend, Gabi, left for a formidable trip around the USA, followed by working a ski season on the French-Italian border.
Our conversation took place on the 19th of March, 2020, as Tom was prepping for his and Gabi’s necessary return to the UK (all timeframes mentioned in the text should be considered with this date in mind). Whilst Tom elucidated the experience of the outbreak affecting his time in France, we also discussed his infatuation with listening to other people’s Dungeons & Dragons quests, the disappointment of subpar bog-standard cheeses, the need for weed, and the reliability of Leeds’ informal support network.
[Text in bold indicates my voice, unbolded indicates Tom’s.]
**First of all, how are you today?**
Yeah, fine. Hanging out. I didn't really sleep last night, so I spent most of the day doing nothing. Went to the supermarket to buy some goods, so when we get to England…
**Oh, wait, hold up. Hold up. I want to first establish what were you doing from around the time of January up until now?**
In January, and up until now, Gabi and I have been working at a ski resort in Montgenèvre, France, which is right on the Italian border. I'm driving people — before everything happened — my average day would be driving people between the resort and Turin Airport, which is in Italy. When I say “we're on the Italian border”, I mean, Gabi and I would go get dinner in Italy because it's a fifteen-minute walk from our chalet to Italy, where the next town over is, Claviere - it’s insanely close. I'm pretty certain on a quiet night I could probably yell out my window and if someone in Claviere was listening for it, they could probably hear me, it’s that close.
**Has it been fun?**
It’s been a lot harder for Gabi than we thought it would be because she's been cleaning chalets and it's intense. As a housekeeper, she cleans the chalets on a Saturday, which is a changeover day when all the tourists leave the resort and then all the new ones for the next week come in and there's a tight three-hour window to clean like twenty fuckin’ chalets or whatever - and hotel standard clean! So that said, it's been hard work, but it's been good fun. I got pretty good at snowboarding which is pretty rad.
**Much cooler than skiing, just in my opinion…**
Yeah, Gabi skis, but I think skiing is kind of for Tories, so … y’know …not to judge a sport…
**Snowboarding, on a spectrum, is definitely the more ‘punk’ option. I mean, they're basically …cold surfers?**
It's exactly the same as surfing, isn't it? Just the water's a different state.
> > > > _Tom on a snowboard, Montgenèvre _
**Did you go there because you were trying to avoid England or was there something about the place that really attracted you?**
Oh — to avoid England!
**Why?**
Because, of course, you've been to Leeds, Riva. It's great, but it gets to this point where it's like … there’s a lot of world out there. When we left in April last year to do our road trip around America, I was thinking, “I'm never going back to Leeds”, but after the road trip and after living in New York for three months, we returned and I thought I could come back to Leeds eventually. And now? I'm excited to go back, but I still don't want to settle down just yet. I think leaving is very healthy to allow me to then go back and assess what I want to do with my life in general.
**It’s good to get things out of your system…**
Yeah, for example, I don't think I'd do another ski season… I know the people that own the company so we got the job pretty easily and probably would again, but before this, we were based in New York — Montgenèvre has just three bars, and we share a chalet with 10 people. It’s a very different lifestyle. Gabi and I both are like “our peak life was New York”. Gabi wasn't working, I was only working three days a week in a bar where I made around eight hundred dollars per week. We were just fucking blowing it constantly because we had nothing to save for. Here, we don't make that much money and we need to save some of it, and there’s not a huge amount to do here so it can feel claustrophobic.
**Great scenes though!**
Oh yeah. No, definitely.
**So, how long has Covid-19 (as the official term) been something at the forefront of your mind?**
I’ve been keeping up with it since it started spreading very rapidly in China. Without wanting to sound like a total dick, I keep up with current events, and there's not much to do out here so there's a lot of reading time… so I knew about it. Then it went to Italy soon after, and we were constantly driving to Italy every day to pick people up. At first, we thought, “surely it won't be that bad. Like, Idk.. it seems like it's not that bad." Then customers started coming through Turin Airport saying things like “they're testing our temperature because they're worried about people having Covid 19.” Once it was clearly a serious issue in Italy we started disinfecting door handles in the vans after the customers get out, we stopped shaking hands with any customers.
**How long ago was that?**
Fuck! Like, at least like a month ago? We needed to be careful because it got rapidly worse, especially in Milan, and we'd also go to Milan Airport sometimes. Once things were obviously bad in Italy, every customer started moving their flights from Turin Airport to Grenoble and Leon, being the closest French airports, but they’re an extra two-hour drive one way. So it went from picking up a customer being a two and a half-hour round trip to a six-hour round trip - if you're fast. That was the biggest thing. Also, the clients and tourists are constantly asking us about it. I feel pretty clued up because people have been asking me questions and I’d try and find out information for them.
**Did you anticipate getting to the point where you’d have to cut this venture short?**
Once flights weren’t going into Turin airport. I thought… I reckon I'll be home in a couple of weeks. Because half the ski resort here is in Italy as well! You can go up a chairlift that's a two-minute walk from my house and from there I could ski down to a chairlift in Italy and it would take maximum twenty minutes. Half the resort is in Italy. So once people weren’t supposed to be going in and out of Italy, I figured we’d soon get sent home by the owners of the resort.
**How did they break it to you? Did they gather all the staff in one place and say we're shutting up so ...piss off?**
Kind of! More politely. There was first a meeting where we were told “coronavirus is a very serious thing and we need to make sure we're handling everything better. Cleaning needs to be done more thoroughly. Drivers, you need to start sterilising your vans” and then a couple of weeks ago they told us we’d probably be going home early, but they’d try and keep everything going as long as possible because a Ski resort is only open five, six months a year, tops, which is how they make all their money. Once the ski resort closes, the town closes. The people who run the company needed it to stay open as long as they could, to make as much money as possible, once it’s shut, that’s it, there's no more money coming in.
**So from that first meeting on it went really fast for you?**
It went pretty quickly. We have official work WhatsApp groups, so every day the bosses have been giving us updates, and then Sunday. Wait was it?… it was Saturday five days ago… I’d finished all my work for the day, I had driven to Leon airport and back, which is a fuckin' seven-hour round trip — and I did that twice, which was destroying me.
**You at least get to listen to some albums though?**
Well, I had customers in the car so I have to have family-friendly stuff … my go-to is LCD Soundsystem because they’re music is like… long songs, non-offensive, but also bangs. If I could listen to what I wanted, it would be my Dungeons & Dragons podcast constantly. But no one who doesn’t know the backstory wants to listen to that for three hours straight.
**You're into Dungeons & Dragons now?**
Did you ever watch Jake and Amir?
**Yeah! What are they doing? How are they quarantining?**
Oh, my god, dude. You should fuckin’ look them up because Jake and Amir, have a podcast called ‘If I Were You’. It's an advice podcast. It's been going since their College Humour days, and it got so successful they started a podcast company — they have recording studios in L.A., and now in New York as well.
**Jake and Amir — the conglomerates!**
Well, yeah, it's called Head Gum, but there's a podcast on it called ‘Not Another D&D Podcast’ and it's Jake with three other people who were also involved with College Humour.. and basically they play Dungeons & Dragons. Murph [Brian Murphy from College Humour] has written this incredible campaign. I'm not being funny. It's Lord of the Rings-level insane! Like, SO fucking good. I'm on episode 92 and each one is on average - an hour and a half? Maybe a bit shorter.
**When did you get into it?**
Gabi and I started to listen to it when we were on our American road trip because we were driving around so much, and it’s four comedians playing Dungeons & Dragons so it's very, very funny.
**Dan Harmon used to have a podcast called **_‘Harmontown’_**, where he was “the mayor” of this… live show. It was mostly a freeform conversation with a mix of recurring and new guests each week but at the end of most episodes, they would perform an ongoing Dungeons & Dragons game, which eventually inspired an animated TV show called **_‘Harmon Quest’_**. So you could add that to your list.**
That sounds sick! I've nearly finished ‘Not Another D&D Podcast’ because they're coming to the end of this campaign.
**I wonder if being addicted to Dungeons & Dragons content is making you better prepared for this quest of… getting back to England?**
I mean, yeaahhh, there's a lot of similarities between me driving to Calais and a halfling, a half-elf and a wood elf trying to destroy a God that's taken over all of Bahumia, which is the land that they live in. I mean, obviously they've been to hell and they go to the Fé Wild, which is another plane and… yeah you're right. You're right, Riva, it's incredibly similar.
**That could just be a metaphor for a global pandemic, no?**
Well, C-bear [a friend] and I have been talking about playing Dungeons & Dragons over Skype because everyone's in quarantine with so much time on the hands.
**So you’re looking forward to the time when you’re back to just chill out?**
Yes and no. Part of me doesn't want to stay cooped up for two weeks. Then another part of me is like, if I'm being forced to stay cooped up for two weeks and I've got weed, I've got food and I've got the Internet and TV… I'm kind of set. If I have to stay inside for what is essentially… the good of humanity, then y’know, I guess that's just my burden to bear and I'm happy to do it!
**How prepared are you for the drive back to England? How are the supermarkets over there? Over here [England] it's a fucking mess.**
We're in a tiny little town so we have to do a twenty-minute drive down the mountain to go to a supermarket in Briançon. It's also a small town with only two supermarkets, we went to the Carrefour. There was food everywhere. It's just the same as normal the only thing missing was basic pasta. The cheap stuff's gone, but they had the ‘next level up’ ‘medium’ pasta all there. Gabi and I bought a bunch of stuff to take back to England with us because we figure the shops there are all fucked.
**Do you think that the French have handled it better or is it just where you are that has been less affected by the supermarket scramble?**
That's the thing — I don't know. I reckon it's probably that we're in a very small town, which means we're less affected. There's no Coronavirus in the resort we're in, no one’s been tested positive for it, there are cases down in Briançon where the supermarket is. But I think [the French] do deal with it better also… like in Carrefour the first hour of the day or the first two hours of the day only the elderly are allowed in — and when I did go there on Monday, there were massive queues, but it still wasn't panic buying. People were just going shopping.
**Were people standing shoulder to shoulder or standing pretty far apart from one another?**
They're spaced out fairly well, and when I was queuing up to buy my food, an elderly person came along and the server at the counter signalled for them to come straight to the front. Everyone in the queue was like “you go to the front line. It's not a big deal.” It's just it's like, it's an extra five minutes. Fuck it. Just let the older person go to the front.
**Small amounts of compassion go a long way.**
Yeah, it's not difficult. As for actually driving back to Calais, I think it's an eight-hour drive, not too far.
**Especially if all you've been doing is driving, what's another day?**
It'll be me, Gabi, that couple I told you about — Robbo and Lynne, who are also both drivers here, and then another guy, Max, who’s a housekeeper here, but he can drive as well. So there are four people in the van that can drive, so to do an eight hour trip with them, plus whatever it takes in England, it won’t be too bad.
**So you’ll be dropping them all off on your way?**
Max is jumping out not too far from Dover. Robbo & Lynne, and Gabi & I are staying a night at an Air B&B near Gatwick because by that point it will have been the majority of the day done, and I don't want to drive to Leeds and arrive super fucking late, then have to try to meet up with this person whose apartment we're staying in, at that kind of late hour.
**How long were you searching for a place to stay? How did this one come about?**
We’ve been looking for a place since the start of the week, but I phoned Joel [my brother, tattoo artist] on Tuesday and I was like, “yo, I’m gonna put out a plea on Instagram again tonight, saying we’re searching for a place. Do you mind reposting it? And also, offer someone a tattoo if they help out? I'll pay for the tattoo.” And Joel said he would and he’d do the tattoo for free. One of his customers replied to the post, saying she’s isolating with her boyfriend and she’s got a studio apartment in Leeds City Centre that's sitting empty so she offered us to stay there if we want.
**Wow!**
Yeah! Joel vouched for us, because he’s lived with us, said we’re nice people — that we’re very clean. Joel told her that because she’s nice and cool and sits really well for tattoos, he’d offer her a whole day of tattooing for free — which I guess is worth around £500?
**It's quite nice that you’ve successfully used a barter system!**
When she messaged me, Katie’s her name, she said “I see all these people doing nice things for others and the apartment's empty and I could do a nice thing for someone. So you don't need to give me any money for it. Joel's giving me a tattoo” and I did still offer to give some money for bills and stuff, but it’s a relief we don’t have to give out loads for rent because we don't have loads of money because we just lost our jobs! Haha…
**What do you think you're going to do after two weeks?**
We don’t know yet. I guess we're kind of waiting to see where the country is in two weeks…
**It sounds like you don't really want to get into the ins and outs of **_all_** possibilities … but if your plans have been to come back to England for a while and work, which might not be possible, particularly in the hospitality industry as it currently stands, that’s got to be stressful. On top of that, to have a plan to go to Canada and work at a camp this summer — are you considering how the pandemic will continue to affect your plans?**
The plan to go to Canada, as far as we’re concerned — because this is what we're being told — that’s still happening. The summer camp doesn't actually start till June, though we're meant to go out there for May. Assuming that flights open up by May 18th, which is still two months away (almost to the day) and assuming that the camp does stay open, because it is in the middle of nowhere. Assuming that… we can still go work there, which would be perfect because we can just get the fuck out. Go work at summer camp. Great. Perfect. If not, fuck, man... I don't know. There's so many possibilities — do we find somewhere to live in Leeds and try get jobs there? The only jobs going at the minute are supermarket jobs or construction jobs and the like. Fuck knows how we're gonna make money! But I've worked a ‘shitjob’ before. I'll work a ‘shitjob’ again just to make money from it.
**I can imagine it would be hard to find a place to rent for the longterm right now. I can't imagine landlords will be wanting to take chances on new renters?**
Exactly! So that's another fucking problem right there. But then again, how many people do we collectively know in Leeds and the surrounding areas? To the point where I think I could probably find someone who's willing to rent a room to a very charming, friendly couple…
**Yes, and you both cook well!**
Really well actually, I just made a bangin' fuckin’ red pesto pasta with sun-dried tomatoes, peppers roasted in the oil from the jar of sun-dried tomatoes, fresh garlic and parmesan — it was a really good dinner. Gabi also made homemade gnocchi. Honestly, there is literally fuck all to do right now. So me, Gabi and Robbo have just been cooking. Yesterday Robbo made this Mongolian-style beef, done in soy sauce, brown sugar, fuckin’ spices. It was delicious. We got the beef from one of the restaurants that's closed early and the chef bought a load of food round for us. Honestly? I had the nicest dinner last night.
**It sounds like if the resort would stay running for the next couple of months, not even as a business, but as a way to look after you, that it would be a great place to stay?**
Yeah, up to the point where it's just… extreme boredom. I don't want to sound so like a junkie… but if I had a weed hook-up here and there was a regular supply of like weed for me, I’d be more inclined to stay. If I could go for big hikes and smoke a joint, that's not an unhealthy lifestyle. But because we're not meant to leave our chalets — if we do we’re meant to take a form with us to show the French police, if they stop us, we have to show it’s because we’re helping someone or that it’s for essential work. You can only really leave your house for exercise or to help an elderly relative or something. The French police have stopped me already.
>>>> _“If I could go for big hikes and smoke a joint, that's not an unhealthy lifestyle”_
**How long's that been going on for?**
Since Monday. We were told then if we’re taking customers to an airport that we need to come straight back, we could stop for breaks, but we were told not to deviate from the route home. We’re a transfer company, so the police could fine us €1000, or something crazy, if it looks like we’re not going in the designated direction laid out in the paperwork we have to carry. For an individual person, I think the fine is much less, like €135.
**I think the boredom issue that you talked about is something most people are experiencing. When you have so little within your environment changing on a daily basis, and the only thing that does change is the world news, which seems to be...**
…Terrible.
**Yep, terrible! At the very least, those conditions lead to boredom. That’s an issue that is going to follow you to England, I think…**
Oh, yeah, definitely. But there are also certain things that... If I'm in England, certainly I'll feel… not “safer”, but if I'm driving in England and I get pulled over, I can talk to the police very easily. Also, I know my rights better in England. And also just being inside in England I can access BBC iPlayer easier! Well, I know that sounds funny, but... French Netflix is shit.
**I get what you mean. When I was in Israel, towards the end of it especially, I wouldn't say that I was homesick for England, but I did feel that if I was going to give myself a chance to start developing my life a little bit more seriously, it's would be easier to do that in a place where I understood the social layout. It's your native playground so you do feel safer — you’re operating machinery you have an intuitive understanding of.**
Yes, exactly. Even if you compare it to an English-speaking country like America, there's something still… England is still England. It's still the place I was raised. I just I know it better. And also, this is going to sound weird, but if it gets really bad in France, to the point where people are rioting and stuff, I'm 100% going to feel safer in England. Even if that happened in England too, then I’d probably know the rioters myself, fuck!
**The French do riot every two minutes…**
They are very good at it, I’ll give them that. But also there’s no TV in this house! If I go back to England, I might buy a Nintendo switch. Yeah, I'd rather be somewhere I feel more comfortable, and again, if I'm going to be in an apartment for two weeks with just me and Gabi, then I'm going to want to be able to smoke weed because it passes the time in a quick, mellow way.
**Weed is gonna be really useful to a lot of people right now to help manage anxiety.**
It helps my anxiety so much. I didn't fuckin’ sleep last night I was so worried about stuff.
**What were you worried about?**
I don't even know! I was distracting myself. I watched ‘Yes Man’ with Jim Carrey and Zooey Deschanel and Bradley Cooper - Dude! Such a good film!
**That’s a shout, I’m might have to rewatch that.**
Such a good film! There's so much to be said about that film that has not been said.
**You can say it now if you want?**
I can't really think of my points now. Let’s just say, there’s nothing wrong with it. I just really want to be back in England to be honest, for the food as well. Like… Cheddar cheese… fuck... why don't French people make cheddar cheese?
**You're in France... **_complaining about the cheese_**?**
Hear me out! You know how the bog-standard cheese in England is Cheddar, yeah? The bog-standard cheese here is Emmental and it doesn't taste of anything. It fucking sucks. It doesn't melt very well. It doesn't taste good on pasta. It's just… It just sucks. It's a BAD cheese. And then obviously there's great cheese here as well. But like, there's only so much cheese you can eat! And basic cheese is great.
**I don't know if I agree with you, I have no opinion on it. You do sound like a very, very English person tired of being in Europe.**
But if I was in Berlin, it'd be different! I think it's also the fact I'm not in a city. I thought I was a countryside person, but I’m not sure. It's cool being able to wake up, look outside and instantly see huge mountains (that I'm probably gonna go hiking up tomorrow because I'm bored) BUT, like, I don't know, man, cheddar cheese! Baked beans! And also like I want a cup of Yorkshire Tea. I want... I guess I like what I know.
**Comfort! It's comfort**
Yeah. It's comfort, it's comforting, Yeah, yeah. And... when you're going through a fucking international crisis. It's nice to have good shit.
>>>> _Gabi in Tom & Gabi’s self-isolation flat in Leeds_