As indicated in yesterdays "small stone" I have now accepted voluntary redundancy. I have a plan. Truthfully I'm not sure at the moment how I feel about it all, but I do have a plan. Basically, at the moment, the plan goes like this.
Leave work on 28th January.
Start applying for overseas jobs.
Spend a couple of months doing up the house.
Sell the house and (if necessary) move into temporary accommodation.*
Do my Summer job at Harrow.
Leave the country .
(* The step about selling my house might be replaced by a step about letting my house.)
Of course it isn't the first time that I've done something like this. After twenty years in IT I quit and spent a year travelling around North and South America. Then after six months in a call centre I did it again and spent another year travelling across Europe and Asia finishing in Singapore, which coincidentally is my first choice of destination when I'm looking for overseas jobs.
If Singapore doesn't work out then I should be able to get a job in China, my second choice, without any difficulty.
The decision wasn't taken lightly and many factors have played into it —the change in my personal circumstances since the death of my father, a creeping dissatisfaction with some aspects of my job (not the teaching, never the teaching), the Government's savage cuts in education spending, the currently offered severance package, my long time desire to work abroad — all have played their part.
I accepted the deal verbally yesterday and sometime this week will be signing the compromise agreement at which point the first bit, leaving my job, becomes irrevocable. It's a much bigger step than the going off travelling was though, because it's really severing my links with home. Always in the past — University, first job in London, travelling the world — there has been somewhere else that I could point to and say "that's home" and someone back in that home who would be there when I returned. This won't be like that. Where I am will be home and, given that this room I'm sitting in typing this blog post has been home since I was six years old (a very long time ago) then not having it will be very odd. Very odd indeed.
Before I go I intend to try to get in as many poetry performances and readings as I possibly can and with any luck I'll be able to find something similar wherever I end up. Whatever happens I shall, as far as humanly possible, be keeping up both this blog and my other photo blog.
Interesting times.
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