Life is never quite straight forward. When I was a little girl I made my life plan; be a teacher, marry a nice man, have three children (two boys, one girl) and be a writer. I never had a plan to teach for all of my life, but I figured I'd teach for a good 30 years and then stop to be a semi-retired lady who lunches.
How wrong could my life plan be.
As it was, I taught full time for less than 7 years before I had children and stopped to be CEO of my domestic empire. By the time my youngest was nursery age, I had been out for 8 years and found supply work to be the best choice for me. Fast forward another 7 years and I was looking to return full time. Almost 15 years after my last full time post, I applied for every job going and got nowhere. I lost out to newly qualified teachers, or to those fresh from their NQT year. I kept on supply, and kept hoping that someone, somewhere would employ me.
By the time I accepted my job as a Learning Mentor and now TA I was desperate just to have a continuity of employment, a daily grind that would pay a little and often. It wasn't the hardest of jobs, but it wasn't the best use of my skills. I'm doing it, but I don't find the pleasure and enjoyment in a modern school that I used to have. Targets, curriculum changes and tests (always the tests!) have changed teaching from an enjoyable and creative career to a treadmill with eyes firmly fixed on the level prize of SATs results. It's not the job I loved as a little girl, and it's not the job I want to be doing until I retire at (as it now seems) 65.
And something similar was happening with the Husband as well. He'd been working as a solicitor since the age of 22, in Liverpool and Manchester. He'd worked for firms, been a salaried partner, been involved (as an innocent participant) in a firm going bankrupt, worked for the Manchester office of a London firm and for another Liverpool firm. And he was getting tired. He didn't like working for the Man. Working for another Man. He was tired of working and watching someone else gather the profits. He was tired of office politics and meetings that lasted long but achieved little.
It came to a head one October holiday. In London, of all places, where we sat reading a book, The Litigators
by John Grisham. It's about a man who has had enough of the Big Corporate World and sets off to be a small hustling lawyer with a 'boutique' firm (meaning small, rather than classy). We both read the book over the week and something in the story set us off thinking. What if we could make a bid for freedom? What if we could set up and be a small firm? What if we could work for ourselves.........
