Categories: uncategorized
Date: 22 March 2006 13:10:18
I thought my life was over.
I was nearing the end of my contract in Germany, having spent the 12 years since I left school training for one particular career. Lately that had meant a series of one-year jobs where the first few months had to be spent applying for the following year's job. But now at the end of one such job I had nothing to follow it. All the applications I'd sent (around 20 that year) had come to nothing. The 12 years of training looked about to reach a dead-end of unemployment. My wife had left me four months before (I'll say more about that another time, but I suppose it would be unkind not to say that this was a mutual, temporary separation so that she could take a very good job in the UK, and we were spending most weekends together), so I was on my own in a foreign land, staring down the prospect of having to start my working life from scratch all over again.
Being unable to face up to that, or unable to think of what else to do yet, I crawled back to Britain and, although unemployed, carried on doing what I had been doing. And after a few months I was offered the job that I'd been waiting for all those 12 years. Life began again.