Early Morning

Its only me and the birds awake. Drizzle falls. They flit around breakfasting noisily. Much calling and song. A collared dove on a highly bending elder branch. Buds developing on the lilac (a self planted specimen from the neighbour's one). I can't sleep anymore. Exhausted last night I sat in bed reading the end of my book for three hours until I couldn't hold off sleep any longer at 11.00pm. We are having what seems like a relentlessly pressurised year at work - going from one intense period to the next. Last year it was Ofsted (twice - once snowed off in February, then the rescheduled in May), the new year has brought auditors (one set threatened in February only to be called off the weekend before they were coming, and now a second lot are here). I had a week off two weeks ago - thinking alot about job satisfaction. If I had the money, didn't need to worry about a salary, what would I do? What line of work might make me feel less like a creative trapped in a monitoring world? I can find no satisfactory answers (something I might like to do which will bring me a salary on which I can live). Despite the fact that I will be 40 this year, I am still trying to decide what I want to do when I grow up. I'm thinking it might be too late already! Two quotes from Joshua Ferris, author, in one of the weekend magazines summed it up quite perfectly for me:

After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.

The inanities and absurdities of corporate life are so obvious... I found  a great deal of nobility there - you know, people doing jobs they might not like, doing it for their kids. Which is not to say that I felt those things while I was there... I felt my life was draining away.