Robin Tudge has started a journalism course in Lambeth. Read here about the roundabout route that took him to London for the NCTJ fast-track programme.

Life changing moments happen on the most overcast, dullest of days.

Scraping a living teaching English in the muggy, dirty, poor city of Hanoi, Vietnam, the school which I'd quit/been fired from months before, peculiarly phoned up about a "mystery email... someone want pay you money".

"Don't you owe me money?" "No," (I could positively hear the receptionist smile), "someone else. Come and see."

Arriving at the school on my clapped out Soviet motorbike, the receptionists, still good friends and gossips, already knew the news of the note from nowhere, and ransomed it for ice-creams.

Finally, 'We printed your Letter From... piece, but have no forwarding address to send the £120 cheque. Can you provide one? Thanks, Editor,' of the Guardian's international paper, the Guardian Weekly.

It was stunning. My piece about getting smashed on snake wine, submitted some eight months prior in winter '98, was printed, being read, worldwide, with my name on it. Except Vietnam. The bombing of Belgrade was going too well for the anti-war Vietnamese government, who sat on all incoming news-sheets for the war's duration.

Friends had said of my letters home I should consider writing, and as English teaching sputtered and stalled, I'd thought, sod it, try. And now, great! But now, what?

Soon back in London, ambition vied with cluelessness, until my father, also a journalist, suggested volunteering for Index on Censorship magazine.

Months of research in its ramshackle Islington office on South East Asian skullduggery and oppression provided a wonderful, table-turning antidote to the anodyne Vietnamese news. Even an 'our man in Nam' column was promised.

In London, hob-nobbing with seriously serious writers, and being taken for one. It had all fallen from out the sky.

The next gilded rung of my platinum ladder to stardom came from China, my girlfriend's venue. A week's job's reconnaissance dug up a Beijing ex-pat magazine, offering a visa, flight and flat to come back and hack for them.

Unprecedented! Unbelievable! People said journalism was an impossible game, but what did they know! Amidst an elite of jaded journalists, battling deadlines and the state to smuggle out raucous revelations about eerie lives of little Red book readers, I was to be.

Unspeakable! Top drawer censoring of my language when re-arriving eight time zones east, on a freezing, dazzling Beijing winter's day, the editor of this interns' vehicle said "no jobs, but maybe you can freelance?"

"Er, yeah" I reeled, "or maybe I can gob at you." Eventually they underpaid me for an appalling restaurant review. I'd been taken for one.

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