Author: maddieisoutoftheoffice

People ask if I’m getting excited about the big move; the truth is I’m scared, petrified in fact.  And because of that I’m doing the worst thing possible and hiding from it.

I’m as head in the sand as anyone could be in Central London where there’s little sand to be seen.  I’m very proactive in my hiding, I must admit; I am doing the ultimate project planner thing of looking busy and actually not really achieving much.  I have spreadsheets, I have a pdf of my June goodbye plans, I have this blog, and I have even started Googling yachts for sale (yes, getting way ahead of myself!) – what I have not done is actually booked a course or found somewhere to live.  I’ve told myself there’s heaps of time, but there isn’t.  My departure is imminent and I need to get my act together.

So, the point of this blog is to ask for you to push me – next time you see me or chat to me and I’m talking about Gormenghast or Suits or reading trashy magazines in the park, please ask whether I’ve booked a SRC (VHF), first aid, sea survival course or committed to a sailing school.  Please ask if I’ve sourced my ML5 medical certificate.  Please ask if I’ve been to decathlon and purchased boat shoes and sailing gloves.  Please ask if I’ve actually booked the flights for the cats and found somewhere pet friendly to live.  Because I would bet I haven’t.

Why am I scared?  I’m scared that I am going to fail at this and have to return, tail between my legs and start all over again, again.  I’ve found myself broke before due to situations out of my control, but I had a great job at the time and was able to just put my head down, eat boiled eggs and give up all luxuries (I still only get my hair cut annually at supercuts) until I got back in the black.  There are certain aspects which can’t go that far wrong – the timezone is the same, so I know I can keep in touch with my friends and won’t be lonely, plus I’ve got Max and Ru of course.  I have established a fixed budget I am prepared to burn through in terms of rent, courses and living costs without compromising my savings.  I’m not burning bridges in London, so I hope I can come back to a City job if it all goes horribly wrong, and I’m taking my CDS material with me when I leave so I’ll be able to read up and refresh myself if I find banking related detail has been relegated by all the sailing info I’m going to have to immerse myself in.

But it is going to be hard, it has been three years since I last sailed, so I am going to be on the backfoot compared to the people I am thrown in with, and I found some of the Day Skipper coursework difficult the first time round (some of you were with me in Val Thorens when I was trying to get to grips with tides…) so I am expecting to struggle sometimes at getting up to speed.  For this reason I am hoping to do as much coursework as possible online so I can take as much time as I need to get comfortable before the practicals.  And then there’s the fact that I’ve never spent more than seven hours aboard a boat.  Without going too far into too much information territory, non land based facilities are going to be an immense challenge for me mentally.

I know I have to pull myself together, I’m already at the point of no going back, there’s still enough time for a little bit more hiding before I start to compromise my own plan, but only just.

I’m scared.  Does that make me weak?

One of the things I’ve found most interesting since starting this journey – I shall call it that even though so far I’ve only moved two miles! – has been the responses I’ve had from others when they’ve heard of my new plan.

Before resigning from my City job I chatted to a senior colleague about what I was hoping to do (he’d just resigned himself for an entire career turnaround, with the onus on a very different work/life balance) and he looked ever so proud of me.  Positively delighted for me.  And that’s really the response I’ve had from most people.  Over the weekend just passed I was described as a catalyst who could inspire others to rethink their lives, after all we’re only young once and I am lucky enough that I can make this change, and take this chance, without risking anyone else’s dreams along the way.  I look forward to seeing if others are equally as inspired to take a risk.

There are, of course, those who “never could”, where the City (and the wage) is too inherent to the lifestyle they love, and the choices they have made.  As I’ve mentioned before, life fulfilling as childbearing and parenting may be it isn’t the path for me, please don’t get me wrong, we need people whose raison d’etre is raising the very best children to inherit this world; if everyone was like me we’d have a splendid and decadent couple of decades, but the human race would probably be left in the hands of the results of accidental drunken pregnancies…..

What’s been unendingly interesting (and also helps assuage the doubts as to whether I have made a sensible decision myself) is hearing from friends/colleagues their ideas of what they would do if they threw it all in and left their respective banking/finance/actuarial/engineering/etc workplaces to do something else too.  It seems, so far, that if all these people followed through with their musings – and only counting the ones who have purported they would come with me, rather than doing something else entirely – we’d quite easily have a beach bar, water sports and rowing club, sailing school and yacht charter, with daytrip booze cruise option, on an island somewhere one side of the Atlantic or the other, serving our group wine, decorated with roses from our group farm, and a private plane to take you on island tours!  All we’re missing is someone to do manicures and waxing; if you fancy doing a course in either of these alongside your day job, please let me know! *

Then there are the people who would (if they could) walk away from this city life we have found ourselves in and work for a charity; it makes me appreciate how lucky we are to live in a world where people are kind.  Not everyone, there are some truly nasty people out there, but a lot of people just want others to have the same quality of life they recognise they are fortunate enough to enjoy.  To give back.  Over the years I have been privileged to make the acquaintance of people who work in nursing and caring, jobs I’d never have the strength of character or disposition to attempt.  For you, who are doing a job which literally changes people’s lives every day, and will probably do so for the next 20yrs, I am going to grab this opportunity in which I find myself with both hands – and hope that I can make you laugh a little bit along the way.  And perhaps I’ll change a few lives too, teach people, help people find confidence and a passion for something new.  Or maybe I’ll just end up running a beach bar and helping people find a reason to smile in a large glass of Vina Sol, that wouldn’t be a terrible conclusion to this adventure – and you’ll all be able to vouch for the fact that I gave it a good old go!

* I’m assuming amongst all of my geeky friends someone would come out with us and do our accounts and tax returns?  Job spec likely available some time in 2023.

Downsizing your possessions to 40kgs (plus 10kg handluggage, which if we’re realistic is a large handbag) is brutal, it’s really hard, and has to be a slightly iterative process.  You end up moving things from A to B to C to A.5 back to C and then eventually ending in B = bin or C = storage container, with only the sacred or essential items in A being permitted to continue on the journey.  Some say it’s healthy and cleansing, and I’m sure it is, but it’s also quite painful because really, truly we all hang on to a lot of stuff due to the memories associated with it.  Even if more recent memories classify as not-so-good, once upon a time you were happy with your life choices and with the people you chose to share them with.  Putting such items in B has to be a bandaid approach, and as soon as a bag of B is full it is directly in the bin store, where it absolutely cannot possibly be recouped without either climbing into said bin store or waiting out on the street when the bin men are due to arrive and nipping in before them to grab your bag…..  Proud to say I did neither of those, and therefore my downsizing is permanent.

There are, of course, already things I feel I have inaccurately categorised, so far:

1) The purple slanket – I knew I wouldn’t need this in Tenerife, but England in April is surprisingly chilly.  I’m also concerned about what I’ll drape visiting hungover friends with to make them feel better in the next two months….  The slanket has stood us well over the last few years (you know who you are!) and I miss it.

2) Ulysses – I think the only time I’m actually going to read any more of this stupid book is if anyone else gets close to beating me to finishing the BBC Top 100 Books.  Until then this is probably the only book I’d sacrifice to keep a fire pit aflame in order to roast sausages before the clothes off my back.  Should have put in storage.

3) Two woollen scarves and an elf outfit – Somewhere in my how-to-be-a-grown-up life lessons I missed the one which explains how you deal with woollens which need to be handwashed.  Therefore I have spent the last two years hiding from certain items of clothing in my laundry basket which needed to be handwashed, because I couldn’t work out what to do with the wet, heavy, woollen items afterwards.  Eventually I plucked up the courage and handwashed them the day before I moved, ergo they were still too wet to go in the container and they’ve ended up coming with me.  Items I couldn’t need less right now, or in the Canaries, I can’t possibly imagine.

4) Cables – How do we accrue so many?  And why are we so scared to part with them just-in-case?  I have brought a drawer full with me in the move; my expectation is I won’t even open that drawer in the next two months, and therefore I will joyously throw them all away!  Cable drawer does also contain the many adaptors I have collated over the years, those I will be keeping, although I may return the one inscribed with my friends’ names which I can only have “borrowed” some time in 2009.  Note I pride myself that I returned the socks I borrowed in 2002 (in 2015).

5) Spirits – Of the alcoholic rather than haunting kind.  I don’t drink sambuca, I hate sambuca, and yet it’s traversed with me my two miles south.  It’s certainly not coming with me to the Canaries, and I don’t intend to open it before I leave unless something really bizarre happens during an evening drinking wine with my transitional housemates (and I don’t mean the cats!) – flatliner, anyone?!  I can’t even remember the day I thought to myself “I ought to buy some sambuca for my spirit cupboard” because, really, aside from vodka and gin, all you really need to make 99% of houseparty guests happy is wine (prosecco and champagne, obvs).  Do trust me on this.  I ran a social experiment before leaving my house and putting the bar globe in storage; all English people want to help a party go with a bang is champagne, vodka, gin, soda/sparkling/tonic water, and lashings of black coffee.

6) Kim  – I kind of miss her.

It’s a month since I quit my job, my lovely safe comfortable job, and three days since I gave everything I own to charity, Freecycle or left out on the street for wombles (I love that my phone autocorrected that to Wimbledon!) of London to take away and enjoy.  I have a whole new plan, a terrifying and exciting plan which could come to fruition or could very possibly leave me with nothing more to my name but two suitcases and a cat crate.  More on that later.

My life has had some twists and turns in the last year, I certainly didn’t expect to be wearing my engagement ring as a novelty ring on my right hand, let’s put it that way!  But onwards and upwards, new challenges await.  Since the husband left I’ve been musing “what next” and in very me fashion – I was born to be a project manager – there have been multiple spreadsheets of options, pros and cons, weighted differences; happiness featuring highly on my scale, likelihood of success featuring higher on my father’s.  Certain options on my list he wrote off with a big fat NO, over a glass of wine (or soda on a fast day).  Until we settled on the idea we both thought would be the right one for me for now; I’d see if I could get myself a leasehold pub, invest five years of blood, sweat and tears, and see how it goes.

The pub business was always my plan back in the ancient days of graduating from University, until my father – basically bribed – persuaded me to give banking a go.  Three weeks was all he asked of me; it’s been eleven years.  I have to admit he was right at the time, banking has been great fun, I’ve made friends for life, I’ve become pretty geeky in my niche part of the banking world, but it’s time to break free of the 9-6pm and do something I can feel proud of.  Having something tangible I can look at and see that I have achieved is starting to feel really important to me, a lot of people want their family to be that, they work simply to put food on the table and pay the bills, but I want my job to be equally my reason for getting up in the mornings.  And I don’t think it’s unrealistic.

So, pubs.  First step was to purchase a car and some glasses, and it happened in that order, unfortunately, I went to look at a car and didn’t realise I’d be parting with 6k before I’d even driven it, but hey ho you’ve got to grab the good things when they come along!  And off I set to the West Country to look at pubs.  Once again though, “the plan” took a life of its own and the pub I fell for wasn’t a leasehold but a freehold.  Weighing up the pros and cons, spreadsheet based obviously, I reckoned I could make this work – assuming I could get the finance.  It would be a much bigger upfront investment, stamp duty is a bitch, but I wouldn’t be tied to a brewery, I could make it as me as I wanted (gluten free anyone?) and it really would be something I could be proud of.

Business loan fail.  It’s a lot harder to get finance for a business than a mortgage!  I’d naively assumed that 25% cash would be sufficient capital, business loan man disagreed.  So, more disheartened than I realised I would be (I’d fallen for the place even though I’d been telling myself to stay stoic until I knew it was really going to happen) I started bandying around various ideas, off list, not even ones I’d put in front of my father in the 18 months prior.  And then, bizarrely, there was one which just seemed to fit; moving to the Canaries to see if I could be a sailing instructor.  Why not?  My parents asked, and I literally couldn’t answer.  I felt a clearness in my stomach and my head replacing the uncertainty and sinking feeling which had been there for the last year and a half.  Why not?

So here I am, I’m taking the 25k I’d have given to the tax man on stamp duty if I’d bought the dream pub and investing it in myself instead.  If it all goes to plan it’s an investment in my future, if it’s a huge disaster then I’ll come back to the City and I’ll certainly have some stories to tell!  I’ve never taken more than ten days off since I was 14, I didn’t have a gap year, so I’m giving myself until next June to figure out if sailing is the life for me – the decision may well happen a lot sooner than that, I’ve never spent more than seven hours on a boat at a time, and I’ve signed up for four weeks in October.  I think that’s the point at which we’ll know if this is not going to work!  Until then I have to work out how to get myself, and my cat crate, to Tenerife.

Unfortunately, this does mean I’ve had to put my life size Kim Kardashian Vogue canvas print into storage.  Sorry, Kim.  I’ll send for you!