Well there is nothing on television and I have inadvertently deleted Timothy Olyphant so I can't watch him again so having started blogging I thought I had better carry on. I now have a sense of panic relating to blogs and I still don't know how to add the photos. My friend Mrs Pao is indisposed so I have to try and figure it out myself therefore it may take some while before photos appear.
As I have said I would quite like to use this 'break' (enforced) in my 'career structure' to do something different with my life. I was a finance manager and I no longer wish to do anything in anyway related to working with figures - ever, ever again. I was absolutely hopeless at maths at school. In fact I didn't do maths, they wouldn't let me, I did arithmetic and only just managed to get a grade five CSE, the next grade was a fail. So how come??? you might be asking me. Well, I fell into working in finance by accident aged 17 having taken a very short term temping job in a finance office. I should have run away from the calculator as fast as my legs could carry me as soon as they offered me a permanent position but unfortunately due to a crush on my tall, dark and handsome manager (no really he was and, in retrospect, luckily for me a happily married man) who told me I could do the job combined with a strong, but ultimately unfulfilled, desire to go back to school and say to the maths teacher who used to shake his head sadly at me 'nah nah naaah look what I am doing', I didn't. Handsome manager was right, I could do it, bookkeeping isn't maths its sums and logic, but it didn't make me happy and I didn't like it. Once I had moved on from the crush phase - eventually - I did try on more than one occasion to get out of finance but didn't find it at all easy to change track. In my last and most notable attempt I went off to do a degree in History and English and American Literature as a mature student (my 40th birthday was slap bang in the middle of my first year exams so my celebrations consisted of a lunch party by a pond on campus - it was lovely and is one of many very fond memories I have of uni). However on graduating and finding myself unemployed I also found I lacked the financial and in particular the emotional resources to hold out for what I wanted which was a career change. Unfortunately jobs were scarce and so I accepted a position in finance via a temping situation (again!) Back where I started I vowed to make the best of the situation, worked hard, took exams, got promoted a few times and was, by the time they made me redundant 12 years later, thoroughly unhappy and incredibly stressed out. Now financially I am in a slightly better position than I was on graduating, emotionally - well I'm older if not wiser. So, here I am - again. Holding out this time. In one of the worst recessions for many a year. Yikes!
Therefore over the past few months I have been considering future career and life path options. My ideal option (other than becoming beautiful, thin and very rich - suddenly) would be to write a book. As a child I avidly wrote stories which were regularly read out in class at school each week. If I wasn't writing I was reading or drawing. So, obviously I will write a book. Actually I have started many books over the past few years. I am the proud possessor of a rather pretty box which is choc full of opening sentences, opening paragraphs, ideas for books, ideas for stories, titles for books, one poem, lists of characters, none of which match with any of the others. However, this book was going to be different, it was going to be based on real people in a real situation. Gritty realism. It was going to be a best seller. It would go straight to the top of the charts in hardback, be translated into sixty-eight different languages, someone in Hollywood would turn it into a film and Meryl Streep would play me. I have my oscar acceptance speech already written. Melvyn would bring back the South Bank Show just to devote it to me. And indeed I started it. It is still there on my computer. One thousand, three hundred and seventy one words, the start of my novel about the organisation that was responsible for my present state of affairs. Apart from why anyone would want to read about it in the first place I floundered because I didn't realise I had such vitriol and desire for revenge in me. I was shocked. So these words have now joined my 'writing' box and I have gone back to the drawing board. Being optimistic - there must be something I can do that isn't finance related...........................
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