Moving On

The title of this blog, "The Hitting The Road Again Blues" seems to have extra significance lately. As followers will know I took the decision in December to leave my job, accept voluntary redundancy, and seek work overseas. Accordingly, I actually finished work at the end of January and since then have been, mostly, sitting on my backside at home.

Well that's not completely true.

I have done some bits of work around the house.

I have cleared loads of stuff - books, music, clothes, bric-a-brac... even furniture, by giving it all away to charity.

I have got rid of at least 70% of my extensive comics collection by giving it all to a fellow collector. In exchange he gives me beer.

I have had the house valued and even, though it isn't on the market yet, had interest from one potential buyer.

Most significantly though, I now have a job offer. My original intention, back in December, was to seek a job in China. I even had an agency in mind to help me organise it all. The water was muddied slightly by the suggestion that I might prefer Singapore, a route I pursued for a while and may still resurrect next year or later. However I can't rely on possible future work so I went back to the Chinese plan.

I had told people that it would take me about a fortnight to get a job in China. I have a realistic idea of just how experienced and qualified I am. In the event I was wrong. It took four days. I now have an offer, a contract and a date. Moreover the date fits very nicely indeed with my previous summer contract commitment. In principle, if I chose to, I could take a cab from my summer contract to the airport and fly to my job in China. In practice I actually have about a week's grace to wrap up my British affairs before I need to.

Now I haven't actually signed the contract yet but I can't see a reason not to. The job has, at least on paper, everything I was looking for. It provides a decent package of accommodation and facilities, a good orientation package, assistance in all the necessary paperwork to work in China and an adequate salary. The money was never the point. The point was to go abroad and teach, as I had intended when I trained, ten years ago, before real life took over and held me in the UK. It's the experience that I'm interested in.

The icing on the cake, for me, is that the job is in one of the nicest bits of China, one of my favourite bits. The specific school isn't determined until later but all of them are in the Guilin and Yangshou areas, both of which are towns that I have visited before and really enjoyed.

As I say I haven't signed the contract yet but I expect that I will. Once I do the potential futures will all become crystallised into one. Things are moving on.