All change - eek exciting!

Isn’t it funny how things can work out sometimes?

I’ve always been a bit of a risk taker, in a minor way. I don’t mean risk to life and limb (although I do drive rather fast and The Hubby says I have a heavy right foot) nor in terms of being very adventurous doing things which would make me uncomfortable (I’m a bit of a wimp about my creature comforts) but a risk in terms of doing something unconventional and different which doesn’t conform with the Surrey ‘norm’.

For instance I’ve married three husbands and dumped two of them for varying different reasons (The Hubby number three is doing OK so far, he’ll be glad to know) changed jobs and careers a number of times and not abided by the conventions of politeness when I think others are, quite frankly, stupid or need a few home truths telling to them. It hasn’t made me any new friends and on occasion has lost an old one, but I’ve almost always had the conviction in my head that I am comfortable with what I have said and done and have said or done it for good reasons with a degree of integrity. I have never set out to deliberately hurt or disadvantage anyone, although I know a few people have done so to me. I hope they can sleep at night. I have never had a great deal of interest in climbing the overpriced and overhyped UK property ladder (who needs a six bedroomed house with a posh postcode anyway? As long as you have a comfy bed and a warm partner to share it and your life with, what else matters?) and I want to go and live abroad in the next few years to get away from the miserable British climate with its rain and chilliness. I am a creature of the sun, I think.

Regular readers of this blog will know I have hated my job for quite a while. The sheer tediousness, expense and unreliability of the travelling, the thanklessness of the customers and the moaning and discontent of colleagues has pissed me off no end and made the whole thing pretty intolerable most of the time (although in fact I have had to tolerate it because it has paid the bills). So back in February, after a particularly bad meeting and appalling treatment by someone in a position of influence over my job and who should have known better, I wrote myself into a report on some restructuring as a redundancy. I wasn’t entirely sure it would go through and be accepted, but it was and a departure date of 31st March 2015 was agreed.

Doing so was an enormous risk; we have a mortgage and bills to pay. A decent redundancy payment will last a fair while, but I will need to earn some dosh and top it up if it is to last until I can access my pension.

So I have taken the opportunity to retrain to do something I have been interested in for some time but couldn’t really justify chucking in a perfectly good job with a high salary to do – beauty therapy. I’m doing a course every Saturday at a really nice little beauty school in Walton on Thames to become qualified to level two standard, and will do a couple of extra modules in popular stuff like massage, then set up my own mobile beauty therapy business. I will be qualified by January in the whole thing, and have already qualified to do manicures and pedicures. I’m loving it; it’s creative, with people and not a computer and much more relaxed.

But the Council is now trying to bring my leaving date forward. There is a significant financial cost to me if it does so, and I have to fight my corner. But there is a lot to be said for getting out of a place that you really don’t want to go to every day and moving on to a new stage of your life. So really, it’s just a case of what I can get out of it.

Goodness knows how we’ll manage financially. But we’re both resourceful, and we will manage even if it means we have to live on beans every day (if that’s the case, ours will be the house with the roof blown off – you won’t miss it). And overall even if we’re skint we’ll be happier. And I can be at home with my dog and cats every day, and we may even get another puppy.

Who knows?

Things, they are a changing....

I’m having one of those days when you feel about 150 years old and ridiculously tired. I had a rubbish night’s sleep, goodness knows why, and woke up as tired as I went to bed. As we all know, when you’re tired any physical aches and pains come to the fore (a sign of aging, sadly) and even the most mundane of problems seem too much of a mountain to climb.

It’s interesting that over the last year, when I haven’t done any shows or had much of an involvement in the theatre at all, I seem to have been as busy as ever and possibly more so. Goodness knows how I found time to appear in shows, let alone direct them with all the preparation and thinking through that involves. A year or so off of what has been my hobby for almost 40 years seems to have done nothing for my stress levels or energy.

In the spirit of remaining positive (mentioned in this blog last week) I’m trying not to let feeling totally knackered all the time get me down. After all, chores are getting done, the dog is getting walked (and I mean walked. I certainly don’t intend to go jogging with her), the house and garden are in good order and I’m managing to have some sort of a social life (although rather reduced from what it was). Paperwork and bureaucracy are being dealt with and I’m enjoying the radio presenting.

I thought your busiest times of life were meant to be from your mid to late twenties to about forty, when you had young children about the place and were climbing the greasy pole at work. So not in your fifties, when you might reasonably be expected to have reached the zenith of your career, to be able to slow things down a little and take some more time for yourself. But I’m exhausted.

Definitely it’s time for a major life change. I fully intend to have a ripe and fulfilling old(er) age and carrying on as I am really isn’t an option if am to achieve that. As I sit here now I can feel my shoulders aching due to computer work, my back playing up due to an uncomfortable train journey this morning, my sinuses congested due to the stuffy office atmosphere with no fresh air and my eyes wanting to nod because I sleep badly. All minor ailments, none of them life threatening or serious, individually hardly worth mentioning but collectively they really drag you down. The mental effect of cumulative small physical problems is significant.

So, plans are afoot which, if they come off in nine to twelve months time, will push me in a completely different direction and much, much closer towards what I want. I’d like to be free-er with less stress and angst, be able to do something creative, be able to work as much as I want, when I want and have a life with less moaning from others and more satisfaction. I’ll be so, so, so skint, but I’ve come around to the view that money isn’t everything and keeping the shoulder to the grindstone to achieve maximum pension or a house in a posh area or another promotion simply isn’t worth it in so many other ways.

The Hubby and I don’t entirely agree on this. Being more attached to Blighty than I am, he wants to work on with slightly different longer term ambitions. And for some bizarre reason, he thinks working in the public sector is worth it because it makes a difference (hmm - debate!). But he has been very supportive of my proposals and it’s safe to say that in the medium term (definitely not as far in the future as the long term) things will be very different. I have mixed feelings – “what have I done?” being one, bravery another and excitement underpinning it all.

But this time, I’m gonna do it!

What shall I do?

As you may remember if you read this blog regularly, I have been investigating various possibilities for an alternative source of income.

I am very tempted to try and use the opportunity we have at the moment to do something completely different. That might mean some sort of consultancy using our public sector experience, it might mean a completely different job or it might mean setting up a little business to do something, probably on line.

When you type in ‘setting up an online business’ to Google it’s quite staggering how many returns you get. Many of them are, if course, aiming to sell you something and a very large number are web design companies because, not surprisingly, to sell online you need a smart, well laid out and easy to use web site. Weeding out the good stuff from the rubbish takes quite some time.

It’s also quite amazing that when you type in say ‘wholesale suppliers of…’ you get thousands of companies aiming to sell stuff to you in bulk for you to sell on to the public as a retailer. No wonder life is getting expensive for a consumer, with all these middle men taking a mark up. I’ve read quite a few articles recently of people who have resorted to getting their bulk supplies from as far afield as China and Russia because UK suppliers are simply too expensive, even taking into account the increased cost of bulk postage from abroad.

I’ve also considered some sort of housekeeping service. When I say ‘housekeeping’ I don’t mean just cleaning but a whole range of domestic services including gardening, maintenance, dog walking, pet sitting, waiting in for the gas man to service the boiler, babysitting, cooking for special occasions and, of course, cleaning. I live in the middle of one of the wealthiest areas of the UK and even in the depths of the recession, there is money to spare. You only have to look around the coffee shops and designer dress shops in Oxted and Reigate to know that the proportion of yummy mummies with good levels of disposable income remains high.

The trouble is, I can’t decide what to do. There are also businesses for sale in Crete which, although not something I had really considered before, are another option. But I do have to ask myself whether I want to spend my time in Crete slaving away when really my aspiration is to move there and relax after a lifetime of slaving away in England. I have a friend who has been brave enough to make the change and moved to the other side of the planet but still has to work; I don’t know if I want to do that. If I’m going to be in the sun, I’d rather not be beholden to anyone or anything (least of all the bank!). I’ve worked for 36 years pretty much without a break and I’d like to stop now.

I am also very conscious that the window of opportunity is very small, because to start up most businesses you need capital and the tiny amount we have due to circumstances will soon erode through the general cost of living. So I can’t prevaricate about this for months, we have to discuss it and come to some sort of decision.

Of course if The Hubby gets another job fairly quickly, the opportunities are endless. Instead of waiting to be made redundant myself, perhaps I could resign and use our capital to set up something on my own. Or we could use it to pay the debts, sell the house anyway and I could stop work – what bliss that would be!

We have a couple of holidays this year still to go and we’re going to use that time to talk all this through. It’s highly likely that by this time next year one way or another, life will be very different! Argh !!!

So lots of you agree with me, then?

Clearly my blog of yesterday struck a chord with quite a lot of you, and judging by the number of comments on the blog itself, on Facebook and by e-mail lots of you feel the same. And it’s always reassuring to know that you are not alone; even talking to people about a (at the moment) very vague feeling of wanting to jack it all in and start again with something more fulfilling, refreshing and less stressful gets comments of “I know, I’ve felt exactly the same recently”.

So what has changed about the world that so many of us feel like this? I don’t ever recall my parents having these sorts of conversations or coming home from their work (which was manual and working class and therefore had its significant downsides including the fact that it was very poorly paid) feeling that it just isn’t worth it and wanting a new start.

Is it that we have had our horizons widened, that we have become more ambitious, more materialistic or simply that much more is expected of us now?

I suspect it’s a combination of the lot and the sad fact is that we are paying the price not only for the previous generation that is living in comfortable retirement now, but also for better health care that means we all live longer and so can’t possibly expect the state to keep us for an extra decade or so and for the lack of planning and foresight on the part of companies, banks and government who should have seen this coming. And it seems unfair that one or two generations should have to pay for the sins of the previous ten and of the few big, hideously wealthy corporations that brought it all to a head.

It would seem that for most of us life is, quite simply, too cluttered and busy. The chase for material possessions which in the wider scale of things might be relatively modest is urged upon us all the time by the irresponsible advertising and finance industries, and our children expect more and more to keep up with their friends. As an example, between us, The Hubby and I now have five children who drive. They all have their own vehicle with the costs that incurs and although we don’t pay for all of them, that is a constant financial pressure. The insurance companies penalise young people regardless of background or education knowing it is the parents that pay. The same parents who are hard pressed in every other way.

Anyone who has had a major change thrust upon them will tell you that after the initial shock, it enabled them to see much more clearly what was important and have the courage to take big decisions and make major changes that otherwise they wouldn’t have been brave enough to do.

So, I come back to a personal note. We need to de-clutter, both mentally and physically. Physically, we have too much stuff (although obviously not too many shoes or, according to The Hubby, power tools). We should have done it ages ago, had a good chuck out and made a few quid at a car boot sale. Just recently, I sold a load of stuff on e-bay and to my surprise made £170. Obviously one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. So that’s something that we can carry on with over the winter with a view to getting rid of a load of it in the spring.

Mentally, it’s more difficult and this is where the life changing decisions come in. If I have to work, I’d very much like to work for myself again, having previously spent eight years self employed and loving every minute although not, at that time, being dependent upon it for my living. But I’m good at that stuff! I’m focused, organised and can, I’m told, be very ruthless. And we now have a window of opportunity which I can’t help but feel we ought to take advantage of. It would mean selling the house and living somewhere cheap to rent (and which takes puppies and cats), but it would give us freedom. In addition over the past two weeks due to changed circumstances I’ve seen loads more of The Hubby, and I like it! We’ve worked together before, maybe we could do it again?

Of course I haven’t discussed any of this with him (in fact he’ll probably find out about it through this blog – oops!) and it would be an enormous risk – our window of opportunity has come about a year or two too soon. But I am beginning to wonder whether we oughtn’t to take it anyway!

I might do something drastic!

I haven’t blogged for a few days. It’s not laziness or lack of opinions (as if) but lack of time.

I am sick to death of life being so busy and having so many things to think about. And I am even more fed up of everyone being such a pain in the arse.

I have worked hard all my life to be where I am today, and whatever else I have been, I have always been true to myself. I have never taken anything which isn’t mine, never swindled anyone (well, I did tell a white lie to the insurance company once about how my computer got damaged, but that’s all) never sponged off the state and never deliberately or maliciously set out to hurt or annoy anyone. And yet somehow, a succession of people one after the other seem hell bent on making my life or The Hubby’s life difficult.

I have decided that most people simply cannot cope with honesty and would rather live in a customised fantasy land where no one ever tells them the time of day or any home truths. I was brought up to always tell the truth, and by and large I’ve always done so. Experience and age has taught me to dress it up sometimes into a palatable form – when I can be bothered - but I have never shied away from confronting a situation and dealing with it face on. But I think it is that uncompromising honesty and straightforwardness which sets me into a different mindset than most and makes me no friends.

It’s been a crap few years, by and large. Health issues which have piled one upon the other, stagnant salaries and increasing bills, ever more unsatisfying work, bereavements, difficulties with family and having to deal with deluded and twisted individuals in a social environment have all contributed to a feeling that I really want to cut ties, do something drastic and start again. I don’t mean something dreadful drastic (ie suicide/divorce/giving away my shoe collection) but simply to re-evaluate life and decide what is important. The bugger is that I will, still, have to work. I’m not going to beat myself up over decisions I’ve made in the past few years, but they have now in the current situation come back to haunt us and life is going to be considerably more difficult than it might have been if I had been more prudent.

A very recent event has forced some difficult decisions about money, and it is becoming increasingly clear to me that striving to earn a senior manager’s salary and hang on for a final salary-ish pension is really not worth the price I am now paying. Nor is hanging onto the UK property ladder worth losing your sanity over. I’ve never really had an ambition to be a ‘lady who lunches’, but I really don’t want to carry on being a ‘lady who commutes and works her socks off’. It’s incredibly tempting to simply sell up, pay off both the mortgages (don’t forget I have a house in Greece which I adore) work out how much money we need to live in a basic way, resign and do something more fulfilling.

I’m not sure I’d have the guts, but it’s very tempting.